Fully Automatic Failover and Failback

Automated failover and failback reduces the complexity involved in a disaster recovery situation. It is protection against the risk of downtime, whether planned or unplanned.

No server reboot

Disks on the server on both the primary and secondary sites are recognized during the initial system boot in a HP 3PAR Cluster Extension environment; therefore LUN presentation and LUN mapping changes are not necessary during failover or failback for a truly hand-free disaster tolerant solution.

No single point of failure

Supreme redundancy: identical configuration of established SAN infrastructure redundancies are implemented on remote site.

Synchronous mode support

HP 3PAR Remote Copy software offers synchronous data transfer mode between storage systems and host. Synchronous data transfers offer the highest levels of data protection. With synchronous operations, both the primary and secondary copies are identical and concurrent at all times.

Synchronous mirroring ensures that data copies are identical, to prevent critical data loss in the event of a failure or disaster. In this mode, data is written simultaneously to the mirrored cache of the primary storage system and the secondary storage system, in real time, before the application I/O is completed, thus ensuring the highest possible data consistency. Synchronous replication is appropriate when exact consistency is critical to the business application.

Storage system configurations

Cluster configurations typically consist of two or more server systems connected to a shared storage system. HP 3PAR Cluster Extension allows the dispersion of data center resources by enabling cluster systems to take advantage of HP 3PAR storage systems configured for Remote Copy operations. HP 3PAR Cluster Extension uses HP 3PAR InForm OS Command Line Interface (CLI) to control the HP 3PAR storage systems (and Remote Copy) with the cluster software, and uses cluster software to react to system hardware and application failures.

HP 3PAR Cluster Extension behavior is based on four major considerations:

•Cluster software failover behaviors

•HP 3PAR Cluster Extension user settings

•The replication mode setting for HP 3PAR Remote Copy, which is used to configure the remote replication feature of a 3PAR storage system environment based on your needs for application service availability, data concurrency, and replication performance

•Remote Copy volume group and virtual volume status information

HP 3PAR Cluster Extension supports the following configurations:

•1-to-1

•N-to-1 (the logical configuration must be a one-to-one configuration). See Figure 2 (page 9).

•1-to-N (the logical configuration must be a one-to-one configuration). See Figure 2 (page 9).

NOTE: Synchronous long distance and unidirectional remote copy configurations are not supported.

8HP 3PAR Cluster Extension features