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MJ3

4 Posts

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February 26th, 2010 19:00

SRDF & RPA DIFFERENCE

Greetings,

Could some one please tell me the difference between SRDF & RPA Business Continuity Solutions . We use both the solution in our environment for data replication.  Wondering, why RPA is required when SRDF brings continuous data protection and continuous remote replication for on-demand protection and recovery to any point in time. Ang feedback woud be appreciated.

Thanks

MJ

dynamox

1 Rookie

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20.4K Posts

February 26th, 2010 20:00

RPA is more sophisticated in my opinion. It runs on a special appliance and provides continous data protection with ability to roll back to specific point in time snapshot. RPA also supports replication between EMC and third party arrays. SRDF is symmetrix only replication technology, it does not have all the bells and whistles RPA has but is a rock solid replication technology.

MJ3

4 Posts

February 26th, 2010 21:00

Thank you so much for the quick and appropriate response..

Could also pls let me know if you have more information on the following as well.

1) Which technology (SRDF/RPA) is more economical in terms of licensing ?

2) What is the latency involved in RPA (Atleast the theoritical value… I heard that the SRDF/A has a theoritical latency of 30secs)

3) In our environment we have been facing issues with HBA failures due to which a re-zoning needs to be done, owing to which we end up doing a full sweep in RPAs. Is there any specific reason why port zoning hasn't employeed to avoid rezoning in case of WWN failures (Anyways in the current scenario we aren't using a different port in case of a port/gbic failure and wait till it gets physically replaced).

4) What is the limiation in amount of data that can be replicated and number of remote copies we can have wrt to SRDF & RPA?

dynamox

1 Rookie

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20.4K Posts

February 27th, 2010 05:00

MJ, i can't comment on your RPA questions because i don't have hands on experience with that product. Regarding number 3, i prefer to stay away from port zoning because if you ever need to move your host to another port on the switch you would need to re-do your zoning. I don't know what vendor you are using for your switch infrastructure but if it's Cisco i would recommend you look into FlexAttach functionality. It allows you to create "virtual" WWNs and assign them to real HBAs. When you create your zoning/storage masking, you would use these "virtual" WWNs, so if your real HBA every happens to fail ..the only thing you have to do is to reconfigure virtual WWN to real HBA relationship, no need to mess with zones/storage masking and i guess in your case RPA.

MJ3

4 Posts

February 27th, 2010 18:00

Thanks Dynamox for your comments & suggestions.

We're using Cisco switches for RPA in our env &  I was'nt aware of  FlexAttach functionality. I did browse & realized that

administrators are benefited from FlexAttach when changes are made in san env's. Many thanks to you.

For the rest of my queries, is there a RPA expert who could share inputs.

MJ3

4 Posts

March 23rd, 2010 07:00

Could some RPA experts, share some more information to my previous query

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