Microsoft “Cluster Enablers” for SRDF and MirrorView

Cluster Enablers Add DR to HA

EMC has long provided a variety of solutions for companies that want to keep data protected and available. For Microsoft applications like Exchange 2003 Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010 and certain SQL applications, this is no exception…

So, just about everyone who knows about EMC is probably aware of our CLARiiON replication technology MirrorView and the Symmetrix DMX replication technology SRDF.  What I continue to find shocking, after traveling around talking to lots of customers, is that a lot of people don’t know about a simple mix between a cluster and our array-based replication.  This clustering integration component is called a Cluster Enabler.

And this technology can be the pinnacle of Disaster Recovery: Zero Data Loss, and a Near-Zero Recovery Time.

Our customers say it best:

“The biggest advantage of SRDF/CE is that it enables us to treat our secondary site like a second room in a data center, which means we can put the active node at our main data center and the passive node at our recovery data center, and not have to buy additional hardware to support clustering.” – Christopher Palagano, OhioHealth

Here’s a link to the customer profile of Ohio Health

Update 1/6/09: here’s a link to the blog by one of EMC’s cluster gurus (and a Microsoft MVP), John Toner. It’s probably the only blog in the world that is focused exclusively on geographically dispersed clusters.

Update 7/15/10: forgot to mention we also have a version of a Cluster Enabler that works with EMC”s RecoverPoint product.  EMC’s RecoverPoint is a powerful replication appliance that can journal data locally or remotely and enable rollback of data to an exact point in time hours, minutes, seconds, or milliseconds ago.  More information on RecoverPoint/CE is available here.

Here’s a Proven Solution test we performed with RecoverPoint/CE.  Our goal was to simply to reduce RTO and RPO.

Here’s what we achieved:

• ŸOnly 7 minutes were needed for a complete farm failover with this solution
• Ÿ4x times less network utilization with RecoverPoint bandwidth reduction
• ŸLess than 1% overhead on CLARiiON storage processer with integrated RecoverPoint-CLARiiON splitter
• ŸMicrosoft Hyper-V used to consolidate 15 physical servers to 6 virtual servers