No two clouds look alike. Just like snowflakes, each one is unique. This is one of the reasons I think the term “cloud” turns out to be an apt term to describe the virtualized IT infrastructures we are all working in today. I have yet to see two separate customer’s datacenters look and act exactly alike. Sure there are similarities, common components, just like clouds being made from the same basic element, but the end result is all unique.
So why would you implement a data protection solution that provides no flexibility in orchestration and automation?
In my mind it is a requirement that any data protection solution not only be optimized for the cloud infrastructure foundation you are using, but can also provide the flexibility in automation and orchestration. It’s flexibility in these two areas that allow the solution to be optimized for EVERY cloud.
By now you are probably well aware of our latest announcement we made at VMworld 2014 introducing EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines. If you need to catch up you can do so here , here, and here.
We have brought to our customers a solution that is optimized and designed for VMware and operates at the VM level (the foundation building block of your cloud).
But this solution is also optimized in Automation and Orchestration. Let’s take a deeper dive on what specific features of RecoverPoint for VMs allow it to be flexible and therefore optimized for your specific implementation.
Flexibility in Automation:
Awareness of Cloud Agility – Every business relies on similar applications but each application is implemented slightly differently and custom fit to meet the needs of the business. These applications provide the most cost-effective impact in a virtualization infrastructure that provides the agility required to maximize application performance and resource utilization. From a disaster recovery perspective, this agility can make keeping track of VMs a hassle if not almost impossible. RecoverPoint for VMs tracks VM location automatically within a VMware ESXi cluster allowing you to simply apply DR policies at the VM level in a “set it and forget it” fashion. Regardless of where that VM ends up via vMotion it will continue to be protected.
Replica Provisioning – When configuring replication of VMs there should be no need to configure and constantly optimize the location of where replica VMs should be hosted. RecoverPoint for VMs enables automatic provisioning of Replica resources to quickly and easily enable protection as quickly as possible. All of the journaling storage allocation and replica VM creation within the VM container you specify is handled automatically.
Flexibility in Orchestration:
DR Policy Configuration – Each business IT use case or application such as ERP, Sales Portals, Customer Databases, etc. all are executed via many mission critical applications components. These can be Database Servers, Client Front End Servers, etc. While there is a use case for consistency across these components, DR in some cases may not necessarily need to occur across all of them. For example, I may need to failover my database in a typical sales portal system, but the Web Front End server is ok.
RecoverPoint for VMs provides policy mechanisms for this scenario by introducing the concept of Consistency Group sets. Each CG Set allows for consistent point in time bookmarking across CGs (or multiple application components), but still allow you to run DR and test operations on individual application components separately. Therefore there is no need to failover your Web Front End servers simply because there is an issue with your Database hosting environment.
Orchestration at Scale – While talking to some customers at VMworld a couple of weeks ago, I heard statistics from customers about the high VM counts they never thought they would be able to achieve. Some of these VM counts were mind blowing! Which truly goes to show the power that the cloud approach brings to the data center. In dealing with these high counts, all of the flexibility and orchestration mechanisms need to operate across the entire cloud.
RecoverPoint for VMs supports all of these features mentioned not only across ESXi servers within a DRS cluster, but can support complex cloud configurations easily that include multiple DRS clusters as well as multiple vCenter sites, for true multi-site protection.
Of all the customers I had discussions with at VMworld each had unique process and configuration requirements that met their needs, no two-customer configurations were the same. Yet they had one question in common, “How can I more efficiently protect this high scale cloud that I am expanding and provide robust DR services before it gets out of hand?” Just like actual clouds in the sky, each recommendation discussion was different with one common denominator; protection at the VM level was the way to go.
For a video overview of the capabilities discussed in this post, click here.