Dedicated static SmartConnect zones are required for SyncIQ replication traffic. As with any static SmartConnect zone, the dedicated replication zone requires one IP address for each active logical interface—for example, in the case of two active physical interfaces, 10gige-1 and 10gige-2, requiring two IP addresses. However, if these are combined with link aggregation, interface 10gige-agg-1 only requires one IP address. Source-restrict all SyncIQ jobs to use the dedicated static SmartConnect zone on the source cluster and repeat the same on the target cluster.

By restricting SyncIQ replication jobs to a dedicated static SmartConnect zone, replication traffic may be assigned to specific nodes, reducing the impact of SyncIQ jobs on user or client I/O. The replication traffic is directed without reconfiguring or modifying the interfaces participating in the SmartConnect zone.

For example, consider a data ingest cluster for a sports TV network. The cluster must ingest large amounts of data recorded in 4K video format. The data must be active immediately, and the cluster must store the data for extended periods of time. The sports TV network administrators want to keep data ingestion and data archiving separate, to maximize performance. The sports TV network purchased two types of nodes: H500s for ingesting data, and A200s for the long-term archive. Due to the extensive size of the dataset, SyncIQ jobs replicating the data to the disaster recovery site, have a significant amount of work to do on each pass. The front-end interfaces are saturated on the H500 nodes for either ingesting data or performing immediate data retrieval. The CPUs of those nodes must not be affected by the SyncIQ jobs. By using a separate static SmartConnect pool, the network administrators can force all SyncIQ traffic to leave only the A200 nodes and provide maximum throughput on the H500 nodes.