EMC

EMC Recover Point Replication

Info: EMC Recover Point brings you continuous data protection and continuous remote replication for on-demand protection and recovery at any point in time. The advanced capabilities of Recover Point include policy-based management, application integration, and WAN acceleration. Replication hardware and software is used in the Recover Point solution:
•    RPAs
•    Splitters
•    RecoverPoint Management Applications


RPA
The RPA is RecoverPoint's intelligent data protection appliance. In RecoverPoint, RPAs manage all aspects of reliable data replication at all sites. During replication for a given consistency group, an RPA at the production site makes intelligent decisions regarding when and what data to transfer to the replica site. The RPAs at the replica site distribute the data to the replica storage.

Splitter
A splitter is proprietary software that is installed on either host operating systems, storage subsystems, or intelligent fibre switches. Splitters access replica volumes; i.e., volumes that contain data to be replicated. The primary function of a splitter is to “split” application writes so that they are sent to their normally designated storage volumes and the RPA simultaneously. The splitter carries out this activity efficiently, with little perceptible impact on host performance, since all CPU-intensive processing necessary for replication is performed by the RPA. The splitter function can be host-based (Windows, Solaris, AIX)), intelligent fabric-based (SANTap, Brocade), or array-based (is used with EMC CLARiion).

RecoverPoint Management Applications

The RecoverPoint Management Applications allow you to manage the Recover Point system.

RecoverPoint logical entities
The following logical entities constitute your replication environment:

• Consistency groups: Consist of one or more replication sets and each replication set consist of production and replica volume to which it is replicating.

Non-distributed (regular) consistency groups
Distributed consistency groups

• Copies: A logical Recover Point entity that constitutes all of the volumes defined for replication at a given location (production, local, or remote). In CLR configurations (our scenario), there is one production copy and two replicas (one local copy at the production site and one remote copy at the disaster recovery site).

• Replication sets: Production volume and its associated replica volumes to which its replication is called a replication set.

• Journals: Use for the purpose of holding images that are either waiting to be distributed, or that have already been distributed, to the replica storage.

• Volumes: In the EMC RecoverPoint Management Application, LUNs are represented as volumes.

                     The following types of volumes exist in all Recover Point configurations:

1. The production volumes: are the volumes that are written to by the host applications at the production site.
2. The replica volumes: are the volumes that the production volumes are replicated to.
3. The production journal volume: stores information about the replication process (called marking information) that is used to make synchronization of the replication volumes at the two sites, when required, much more efficient.
4. The replica journal volumes: It’s the journal volume on the replication site.
5. The repository volume: A special volume, called the repository volume, must be dedicated on the SAN-attached storage at each site, for each RPA cluster. The repository volume serves all RPAs of the particular cluster and splitters associated with that cluster.

• Snapshots: A snapshot is a point in time marked by the system for recovery purposes.

• Links: Communication pipe between a production and replica copy, through which data is transferred.