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The PowerStore native replication features allow supported storage resources to be replicated remotely between systems. Table 6 shows the supported system configurations.
Table 6. Supported system configuration for replication
Replication Type | Source | Target | Block | File |
Asynchronous | PowerStore T/Q model | PowerStore T/Q model | ✓ | ✓ |
Synchronous | PowerStore T/Q model | PowerStore T/Q model | ✓ | ✓ |
Synchronous - Metro* | PowerStore T/Q model | PowerStore T/Q model | ✓ |
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* For details about metro, see the Dell PowerStore Metro Volume white paper.
This section also outlines the supported configurations for native asynchronous replication and synchronous replication. For more information about which systems are supported for asynchronous replication, see Not Appendix A: Replication support across platformsNot Appendix A: Replication support across platforms.
The native replication feature is supported in many different topologies. Deployment models vary depending on the configuration requirements. At a system level, the following configurations are supported:
Figure 56Figure 56 shows these supported topologies. The figure uses volumes to represent the storage resources. Asynchronous replication allows for many different deployment models to meet the needs of an organization.
Figure 56. System-level asynchronous and synchronous replication topologies
The bi-directional replication topology is typically used when production I/O must be spread across multiple systems or locations. The systems may exist within a single data center or in different, remote locations. With this replication topology, production I/O from each system is replicated to the peer system. During an outage, one of the systems can be promoted as the primary production system, and all production I/O can be sent to it. Once the outage is addressed, the replication configuration can be changed back to its original configuration. This replication topology ensures that both systems are always in use by production I/O.
The one-to-many replication topology is deployed when production exists on a single system, but replication must occur to multiple remote systems. This replication topology can be used to replicate data from a production system to a remote location to provide local data access to a remote team. At the remote location, thin clones can be used to provide host access to the local organization or test team.
The many-to-one replication topology is deployed when multiple production systems exist and are replicating to a single system to consolidate the data. This topology is useful when multiple production data sites exist, and data must be replicated from these sites to a single DR data center. One example of this configuration is a remote office branch office (ROBO) location.
For the one-to-many and many-to-one replication topology examples that are shown in Figure 56Figure 56, one-directional replication is depicted. One-directional replication is not a requirement when configuring the one-to-many and many-to-one replication topologies. Each individual replication connection can be used for bi-directional replication between systems. This ability allows for more replication options than what is depicted in the figure.