Traditional data recovery tasks related to planned outages and impending events are common for IT administrators in many organizations. Typical IT data center maintenance—such as software upgrades, hardware maintenance, and configuration changes—is required to ensure the efficiency of data center systems. Proper maintenance can prevent unplanned downtime in the long term; however, routine maintenance can potentially interrupt service availability, causing business disruption and lost revenue. Severe predictable natural disasters, such as floods and hurricanes, can also cause business disruption for prolonged periods of time. When these events occur, it is often necessary for administrators to perform manual data recovery tasks. Some level of automation can be achieved through scripts closely tailored to specific vendor solutions, but these often require expensive onsite consulting services.
Dell™ Compellent™ Live Volume, an innovative software feature for the Dell Compellent Storage Center Storage Area Network (SAN), delivers dynamic business continuity to keep applications online and data accessible during planned downtime. Live Volume provides a new layer of virtualization that enables a physical server or virtual machine (VM) to share a virtual storage volume between two Storage Center SANs in a semi-synchronous configuration.
When preparing for planned maintenance or anticipating another type of outage or disruption, administrators can quickly and easily designate primary status to the secondary system on demand—in either the same data center or another local data center—ensuring continued availability without disrupting user access to data. Live Volume also helps organizations balance workloads on demand without disruption. With dynamic horizontal movement of data between systems, administrators can easily migrate data sets to a new array, optimize I/O performance, maximize resource utilization, and accommodate demand spikes caused by end-of-quarter financials, retail promotions, or other short-term periodic events.
Live Volume works in the Oracle VM environment, automatically moving storage volumes in sync with VM movement between hosts. An important complement to remote replication and server virtualization, Live Volume can help organizations reach a new level of availability and flexibility. Storage is no longer tied to one production SAN, but rather virtualized between two SANs, with semi-synchronous replication for continuous data protection, regardless of physical location—data is written first to the volume on the primary array, then replicated to the other instance of the volume on the secondary array
Download the full whitepaper here: http://downloads.dell.com/solutions/enterprise-solution-resources/Dell%20Compellent%20Live%20Volume%20for%20Oracle%20VM%20v3.pdf