Cloud Storage Solutions

We're pleased to announce the release of the new IBM DS8000 Storage Replication Adapter version - 2.3.1. As you know, IBM DS8000 Storage Replication Adapter is a software add-on that integrates with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) solution. It enables SRM to perform failovers together with IBM DS8000 storage systems.

This release brings the following new features:

• Adding support for the Extent Space Efficient (ESE) volumes, offering customers an option of producing an ESE volume when SRA creates flash copies.
• Removing the GM Flashcopy on the source site after successful re-protect. This prevents consumption of the pool capacity at the source site and improves overall system efficiency.

In addition, version 2.3.1 introduces support of the all-new member of the DS8000 family, DS8880 (v.8.0), enhancing its industry-leading disaster recovery capabilities.

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’.

Good news, everyone! Our IBM XIV Storage Replication Adapter (SRA), version 2.3.0 is fully certified to operate with the following releases of the VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager: 5.5, 5.5 Update1, 5.8, 6.0 and 6.1. In addition, this release brings support for synchronous mirroring, using the newest IBM's all-flash storage offerings: ultra-fast IBM FlashSystem A9000 and IBM FlashSystem A9000R.

Details are in the VMware Compatibility Guide at https://ibm.biz/Bdrby2. The product documentation is available on IBM Knowledge Center at https://ibm.biz/BdrpBb.

We worked hard and it finally happened! Our own IBM XIV Storage Replication Adapter (SRA), version 2.2.2 is fully certified to operate with the following releases of the VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager: 5.5, 5.5 Update1, 5.8, 6.0 and 6.1. Although this version is considered a minor release, making the SRA work with all the latest SRM versions was a challenging goal, involving a battery of compatibility tests and closely tied cooperation between the IBM and VMware interoperability teams.

Details are in the VMware Compatibility Guide at https://ibm.biz/BdHuPj. The product documentation is available on IBM Knowledge Center at https://ibm.biz/BdHL7A.

Time to do some XIV mirroring :).

The long and arduous road to HyperSwap is over! We are happy to announce a release of a new software version of our blazingly fast FlashSystem A9000 and A9000R. This is version 12.1, which brings HyperSwap to our storage clients. HyperSwap solution is an ingenious way of providing high availability based on active-active pairing of storage systems per volume or per consistency group. Each volume or consistency group pair uses synchronous replication to keep both systems updated at all times. When certain conditions apply, an automatic and completely transparent failover is performed, so that the applications experience no downtime. As soon as the actual failure is recovered, the pair is automatically resynchronized.

For easier integration with VMware, Linux, AIX and Windows platforms, we've upgraded these Cloud Storage Solution products:

• IBM Spectrum Accelerate Family Storage Replication Adapter, version 3.0.0 for combining VMware SRM failover capabilities with state-of-the-art HyperSwap high-availability solution.
• IBM Storage Host Attachment Kit, version 2.8.0 for hassle-free attachment of Linux, Windows Server or AIX hosts to FlashSystem A9000 and A9000R storage systems in HyperSwap relations.
• IBM Spectrum Accelerate Family Provider for Microsoft Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service, version 2.9.0 for fully automatic creation of snapshots on HyperSwapped FlashSystem A9000 and A9000R storage systems.

Upgrade now to unleash the full power of the HyperSwap disaster recovery!