Affordable Unified Array-Based Protection and Recovery Solution for the Midrange
Since being announced in May of 2016, the Dell Unity™ family of midrange has been globally adopted by over 1,800 customers across varying markets. More and more, small-to-medium-size businesses (SMBs) are rapidly adopting Unity storage to run their businesses and virtualized workloads. Unity’s main design principles — Simple, Modern, Flexible and Affordable – have strongly resonated with SMBs struggling with reduced budgets and constrained resources that has since given rise to the ‘IT generalist’ – those being called upon inside these organizations to handle a wide array of IT technologies and products without intrinsic specialty skills.
But not to worry – that’s exactly the business profile Unity was designed to address with its unparalleled simplicity across the entire storage lifecycle – acquisition to set-up and install to configuration and management to service and support. And it’s why SMBs – and IT generalists – are energetically jumping on board with Dell Unity.
Let’s spotlight one area where Unity’s simplicity and all-inclusive software model can streamline a relatively complex IT process or specialty – data replication for virtualizedapplications in VMware environments. First, the new HTML5 management interface gets Unity configured for VMware environments in just a few minutes. And secondly, Unity includes the Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines™ (RP4VMs) software along with 15 free licenses with every Unity system. RP4VMs running on Unity storage enables IT generalists to simply and efficiently create a disaster recovery solution for VMware virtualized environments. SMBs can affordably establish local and remote protection (and migration) plans for their businesses with this robust hypervisor-based replication solution with continuous data protection for per-VM recovery to any point in time, and built-in automated disaster recovery orchestration.
Let’s look at a couple of scenarios where Unity and RP4VMs can make a significant difference for SMBs and IT generalists trying to provide a full complement of data protection, recovery, and migration services – affordably, efficiently, and easily.
Use Cases
Hypothetically, ABC Capital, Inc. is a major financial institution that accepts deposits, offers checking account services, makes business, personal and mortgage loans. They needed a disaster recovery solution for their large scale VMware environment that they could depend on to hold all of this important information. Their mission critical data base can’t afford to lose a days’ worth of work and they were looking to further invest in protecting their data. Fortunately, with RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, if there were something to occur at one site, they still have another site to pick up the slack. RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines reduces WAN bandwidth consumption by up to 90%. It also ensures replication robustness, sustaining poor WAN conditions with up to 300 milliseconds of latency and up to a 5% packet loss. With the replication capabilities of RP4VMs, ABC Capital, Inc. can ensure that their business is sustained in the event of disaster. RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines running on their Unity all-flash array allows ABC Capital to have a Unity at their primary site and a re-purposed VNX2 on their secondary site. This gives them a replication tool that supports all Dell storage platforms. RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines is the replication tool of choice for Dell across the board and we’re the only vendor that offers remote protection over synchronous distances.
Another example is Television, Inc. They are a well-established multi-media company that provides different kinds of services, including text authoring, photography, graphic design, and video and audio services. Although a little bit different than ABC Capital, Inc., they were looking for a less stringent data migration solution to implement within their environment. Television, Inc.’s main focus was not only to migrate their data but to asynchronously replicate it in the event something was to happen during a data center move. Using RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines provided with their Unity system, adds a second level of protection in case of a migration or storage failure by having the target volume and journal available as a real-time backup of the production data. Aside from maximizing application availability, RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines allows for Television, Inc. to quickly migrate data between their Unity storage system in New Jersey and their software defined instance of Unity – UnityVSA – in New York City. Also, having UnityVSA on their secondary site allows for a low cost solution within their budget constrained environment. Television, Inc. choosing Unity with RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines means that they can address the most demanding applications requiring zero RPO which none of our competitors provide today.
Summary
We hope you’ll take advantage of the many all-inclusive software features and capabilities that come with every Unity system – especially RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines. Unity’s industry acclaimed storage lifecycle simplicity combined with the efficient RP4VMs solution will give any SMB the best solution to protect and recover their VMware environment and ensure that VM service levels are met. Get the best of both solutions working together for your business – a unified all-flash storage array to accelerate virtualized applications that simplifies operations – and an array-based (no impact on servers) data replication solution that easily manages hypervisor-based replication with automated disaster recovery workflows, fully integrated into VMware.
This blog post was co-written by Joe Catalanotti