Let’s face it: even the most resilient, robust, and secure storage sites, located above ground or even underground, could potentially be exposed, in a certain degree, to all kinds of disasters that may temporarily or indefinitely halt the site operation. This could be an extreme weather condition or natural disaster (hurricane, tornado, earthquake, etc.), a prolonged and unplanned interruption of power supply (power grid or power station failure), an accident, act of war, cyberattack, and who knows what else – God forbid…
Enterprises that rely on non-stop, continuous, and unbreakable access to data, as well as on the ability to keep existing data integrity in parallel to on-going update/writing operations at the highest possible standards, must have disaster prevention and recovery mechanisms in place, ready to be used at any point in time.
Enterprise-class storage systems, such as IBM XIV Gen3, IBM FlashSystem A9000, and IBM FlashSystem A9000R, provide advanced site mirroring capabilities, either synchronous or asynchronous, including 3-site mirroring for XIV Gen3, and HyperSwap for FlashSystem A9000 and A9000R. These native underlying replication and high availability (HA) technologies allow these IBM storage systems to serve not only conventional hosts and clusters, but also virtual machines in VMware and Microsoft cloud environments, as well as OpenStack cloud nodes.
Virtual machines duplicates can be deployed at a secondary backup site, together with the backup storage systems to serve those sites.
- In a Microsoft Azure environment, automatic failover to the backup or primary site is natively supported by the storage system, by using Microsoft Azure Site Recovery.
- In a VMware environment, virtual machines can be recovered by using VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) together with the IBM Spectrum Accelerate Family Storage Replication Adapter (SRA), which also supports – starting from version 3.0.0 – HyperSwap operations.
- OpenStack high availability configurations are also supported.
For detailed information about employing HyperSwap for VMware and Microsoft environments, refer to the IBM Redpaper: ‘IBM HyperSwap for IBM FlashSystem A9000 and A9000R’. Additional data protection scenarios are described in this IBM Redpaper: ‘IBM FlashSystem A9000 and A9000R Business Continuity Solutions’.