Data is one of the most valuable assets to an organization. Because users and their customers access data constantly, directly and indirectly using various applications, data is a crucial part of day-to-day operations. Outages can occur at any time and can be restricted to a single system or to an entire data center or location. Whether they are planned outages such as regular maintenance, or unplanned events such as a power outage, it is a top priority to ensure that critical data is always available.

A business continuity plan for critical data can prevent these costly outages. To protect against different scenarios, an organization should plan and implement a data-protection strategy that includes a data-replication solution.

Asynchronous replication can be used to protect against a storage-system outage by creating a copy of data to a remote system. Replication is a software feature that synchronizes data to a remote system within the same site or a different location. Replicating data helps to provide data redundancy and safeguards against storage system failures at the main production site. Having a remote disaster recovery (DR) site protects against system and site-wide outages. It also provides a remote location that can resume production and minimize downtime due to a disaster. The PowerStore platform offers many data-protection solutions that can meet disaster recovery needs in various environments.

Asynchronous replication is primarily used to replicate data over long distances, but it can be used to replicate to systems within the same location also. The asynchronous replication for PowerStore is designed to have minimal impact on host I/O latency. Host writes are acknowledged when they are saved to the local storage resource, and no additional writes are needed for change tracking. Because write operations are not immediately replicated to a destination resource, all writes are tracked on the source. This data is replicated during the next synchronization. With protection policies, asynchronous replication uses the concept of a recovery point objective (RPO). The RPO is the acceptable amount of data, measured in units of time, that can be lost due to an outage. This delta of time affects the amount of data that must be replicated during the next synchronization. It also reflects the amount of potential data loss in a disaster scenario. PowerStore asynchronous replication features can be configured using PowerStore Manager, PowerStore CLI, or REST API. RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines supports VM replication for PowerStore and is configured using the Unisphere Manager for RecoverPoint user interface.

Metro and synchronous replication focus on zero RPO for the replicated data. PowerStore’s built-in synchronous replication technology ensures that all data is identical on the local and remote storage resources. Compared to asynchronous replication, a volume with active synchronous replication or metro configuration acknowledges the host writes after data is saved on the remote storage resources. This has some impact on performance due to the additional latency from the replicated writes.