Dell PowerStore Protecting Your Data

Replication

Data replication is a process in which data is duplicated to a remote system, which provides enhanced redundancy in case the main production system fails. Replication minimizes the downtime-associated costs of a system failure and simplifies recovery following a natural disaster or human error.

PowerStore supports asynchronous and synchronous remote replication for volumes and volume groups, NAS servers, and virtual volumes.

To configure replication for volumes and volume groups:

1. Create a remote connection between the source and destination systems.
2. Create a protection policy with a replication rule that best meets your business needs.
3. Assign a protection policy to the volume or volume groups.

To configure replication for NAS servers:

1. Configure and map the file mobility network.
2. Create a remote connection between the source and destination systems.
3. Create a protection policy with a replication rule that best meets your business needs.
4. Assign a protection policy to the NAS server.
   NOTE:It is not recommended to modify the file mobility network when the peer system is unreachable. When the peer system is up again, the result may be that both NAS servers are in production mode.

To configure replication for virtual volumes (vVols):

1. Create a remote connection between the source and destination systems.
2. Creating protection policies and assigning them to virtual volumes is done on vSphere. See Virtual volumes replication.

For volume and file replication, PowerStore enables you to failover control to the remote system and reverse the direction of a remote protection session. Failover may be required in the following cases:

• If you want to migrate data to a new system, and then switch to working from it without losing data. In this case, you can perform failover with no data loss.
• When there is no access to the data in the source system, you can switch to the remote system, and continue working using the latest point-in-time remote protection copy. However, data loss might occur in this situation because the latest copy in the remote system does not include data changes that are made between the time this copy was created and the time the data in the system became inaccessible.
• When the data in the source system is accessible but its integrity may be compromised. In such a case, you should revert to the latest point-in-time protection copy created before the data was compromised.

You can perform a failover test on the destination storage resource to test the system disaster recovery readiness.

For detailed information about replication-related procedures that you can perform, see the Replication chapter.

For detailed information about synchronized and unsynchronized replication limits, see Dell Technologies PowerStore Simple Support Matrix on the PowerStore Documentation page.