Cisco Cisco MDS 9000 I O Accelerator Libro bianco
White Paper
© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Cisco Delivers Enterprise-Class Next-Generation Acceleration
Solution for Disaster Recovery and SAN Extension
Solution for Disaster Recovery and SAN Extension
Large enterprise customers have multiple data centers spread across different geographical locations,
primarily because of the economics related to the cost of running data centers and governmental disaster-
recovery regulations. According to “The InfoPro Storage Initiatives 2009”, backup redesign and disaster
recovery will be among the top initiatives for businesses going forward. Hence, Business Continuity and
Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) emerges as one of the critical areas of focus as these data centers virtualize,
unify, centralize, and scale out their storage resources. Both online and offline data mobility between data
centers is a critical requirement to support resiliency and operational agility. IT departments today must
address several challenges related to deploying simple yet scalable replication and backup applications in
order to meet the growing expectations of BC/DR mandates.
Cisco has introduced the Cisco
®
MDS 9000 I/O Accelerator (IOA), which provides a highly scalable and
comprehensive next-generation I/O acceleration solution capable of dramatically reducing both the
complexity and cost related to the BC/DR initiatives.
This document discusses some of the critical challenges related to the BC/DR solutions and how the
Cisco MDS 9000 IOA addresses each of them.
Extend Data-Replication Distances
Challenge: Extend the distance between data centers for replication solutions to bring flexibility in choosing
data-center locations.
An effective BC/DR plan mandates the deployment of multiple data centers located at optimal distances and
locations to protect against regional power failures or disasters yet close enough for data replication without affecting
the application performance. In many cases the primary data center replicates to a relatively nearby secondary data
center over a metropolitan-area network (MAN) and the secondary site in turn backs up the data to a more-distant
DR site across a WAN. This approach provides a good balance of recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time
objective (RTO) for all levels of outage, but depending on the location, such a model can be costly. The challenge is
to optimize the cost by finding the right data-center locations for BC/DR.
Solution: The new Cisco MDS 9000 I/O Accelerator can extend distances for replication solutions such as
the EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF), MirrorView, and HDS TrueCopy.
By reducing the latency of the I/O exchanges between the replication node and the secondary storage, the IOA
allows replication over longer distances, providing flexibility in selecting the locations while minimizing the effect on
application performance. The actual distance depends on the application requirements and infrastructure.
Reduce Tape-Backup Windows
Challenge: Reduce the backup window to meet your backup service-level agreements (SLAs).
Electronic data vaults using virtual or physical tape-backup applications have become an integral part of an
enterprise’s BC/DR plan. However, uninterrupted and timely completion of the backup jobs is critical to meeting the
stringent SLAs.