The following figure illustrates logical view of disaster recovery setup of two-layer using PowerFlex asynchronous replication feature.

Figure 3.              Logical architecture

In the two-layer PowerFlex system, the SDC is installed on compute-only host, while the MDM, and SDS components are installed on back-end storage-only nodes. The SDS aggregates and serves raw local storage in each node and shares that storage as part of PowerFlex cluster. A single protection domain is carved out of drives on these SDS systems. A single storage pool is configured, and multiple volumes are carved out to meet the Oracle RAC ASM disk group database requirements including volumes for data, redo logging, voting disk, grid infrastructure management repository and flash recovery area. The volumes are mapped to compute-only nodes and later mapped to Oracle virtual machine.

Note: The solution was validated in engineering lab using two-layer PowerFlex system with VMware vSphere environment, but the reference architecture and the best practices demonstrated in this paper are applicable for both virtualized and bare metal configurations.