The following figure represents an environment where two equal PowerFlex systems are configured, but there is only one active protected site and one idle recovery site. Such an architecture enables the business to continue to run at full capacity at the recovery site in the event of a failure. In other words, the recovery site has all the resources required to run the production workload as it is a mirror image.
As leaving hardware idle is not an option for many customers, The next figure, displays the same two PowerFlex systems, but this time each site is actively servicing VMs and has a role as a protection and recovery site. While this configuration is able to utilize all the hardware at both sites, rather than have a system remain idle, it is important to remember that in the event of failure, a single site must run the load from both environments. As such, it is imperative that the business understands the SLAs or service level agreements (if any), and whether they permit a reduction of performance in the event of a failure. It is critical to size the environments appropriately, based on the SLAs, to account for the extra load during a failure.