Preventing the loss of data or transactions requires a reliable method of continuous data protection and high availability. For disaster avoidance and planned outages, applications and services must be made available at an alternate site. VxRail dynamic nodes and PowerStore native replication solutions can replicate data to other systems, whether they are at the same site or at a remote facility. Synchronous replication with Metro Volume differentiates itself from the other methods by guaranteeing transactional consistency between PowerStore clusters during normal operation.

A Metro Volume provides synchronous replication of spanned block storage volumes across two PowerStore clusters in metro distance for VMFS datastores. PowerStore provides native block Metro Volume support in a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster architecture (vMSC). A vMSC provides fully active and workload balanced data centers with resources in a stretched vSphere cluster. The stretched cluster infrastructure can be in same data center, or even across site borders in two different sites in metro distance. Metro Volume configuration provides disaster and downtime avoidance with vSphere High Availability (HA). For more information about high availability and disaster recovery in a vMSC configuration, see VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC).