On June 29th, Commvault, a global enterprise leader in intelligent data services across on premises, cloud and SaaS environments, announced it has expanded its strategic partnership to include MetallicDMaaS to Oracle Cloud
As hybrid cloud solutions became critical for customers, in 2019 Commvault created a venture called Metallic – its first SaaS offering to better provide Data Management-as-aService (DMaas) across multi-cloud environment
As part of Commvault’s continued support for customer’s hybrid and multi cloud journeys Metallic’s industry-leading services will now also be offered on OCI and available in all commercials OCI regions globally and be available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace
OCI coupled with Metallic data management as a service (DMaaS) enables enterprise customers to protect and secure their data against threats, adhere to local data residency laws, and ease data management and recovery
Together, Metallic and OCI will deliver superior price-performance, built-in enhanced security, and simplified recovery and management for enterprise customers looking to accelerate their OCI transition and protect critical data assets in the cloud while maintaining complete flexibility across customer-managed storage or a fully managed Metallic data protection service.
Metallic’s data protection now spans Oracle Cloud VMware virtual machines, Oracle Database, Oracle bare metal servers, Oracle Containers for Kubernetes, and Oracle Linux and becomes available to over 400,000 Oracle enterprise customers looking to leverage Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for protecting their mission critical data.
In addition to the offering with Oracle, Metallic also delivers Backup-as-a-Service and Data Management-as-a-Service solutions for Microsoft Azure and AWS.
Metallic is the only DMaaS solution to protect across Azure, AWS and now OCI
Special Points of Note:
Expanded partnership is part of Commvault’s continued support for customer’s hybrid and multi cloud journeys
Metallic is the only DMaaS solution to protect across AWS, Azure and OCI to help enterprises’ multi-cloud journey
Benefits include:
Speeds cloud adoption for backup copies, driving data to OCI
It helps to ease data mobility, make it simpler to customers to securely move VMs and apps to OCI
Provides seamless protection of OCI workloads to OCI – with management across full data estate
Secure Backup from Ransomware and Malware
Secure – Air-gapped ransomware protection with encryption built-in
Flexible – Meet long and short-term data retention needs with OCI Standard and OCI Infrequent storage tier backup targets for Metallic DMaaS
Simple – Purchase. Add. Apply. Single pane of glass management makes administration easy
Commvault and Oracle: a 25-year history of integration
Commvault has long supported Oracle customers protecting the crown jewels of their enterprises – their Oracle data. We have more than 3,000 joint customers, which is increasing every year, and the amount of Oracle data we are protecting has grown by more than 30% year over year.
More than 400,000 customers rely on Oracle today to run their businesses. As many of those companies are accelerating their own cloud adoption and migrating to OCI – they have a natural need for agile cloud solutions to protect along that journey.
As Oracle accelerated its own cloud business, bringing the power of OCI to its customer base, Commvault kept pace. In 2017, Commvault underscored our support for Oracle customers moving to OCI, through our Commvault Complete software. Two years later, we introduced Metallic SaaS – which has quickly grown to become the gold standard in data management as a service. With today’s news, Oracle customers who need all the benefits of a SaaS-delivered solution, can now harness the power of Metallic with OCI to protect their data on premises and in the cloud. We’re excited for this natural evolution of our partnership to meet customers where they are with the most innovative and flexible SaaS solutions in our industry.
We’ve all seen how cloud adoption is accelerating, along with a need for multi-cloud solutions, with 89% of companies reporting a multi-cloud strategy. (1) Unfortunately, the timing of this cloud transformation comes at the same time as some unprecedented risks:
First, ransomware and new cyberattacks are quickly trending in the wrong direction. We’ve not only seen a massive spike in successful breaches, but also a growing sophistication in the nature of attacks. We’ve heard the adage before, it’s not “if,” it’s “when” — creating new risk around data and system protection.
Second, constrained resources. Successful digital transformation takes new and unique skills, to drive change and accelerate to the cloud. This complimented with the well-publicized skills gap leads many IT organizations hamstrung in an already do-more-with-less world.
And lastly, hybrid cloud data sprawl. As companies drive to digital transformation faster than ever, business data is increasingly spread across every application, device, on-prem, and cloud environment. This multi-generational data sprawl is challenging to manage and safeguard, even more so now as hybrid cloud strategies take hold.
By adding support for protecting OCI workloads and writing to OCI Storage, Metallic’s data protection now spans OCI VMs; Oracle Databases; and Oracle Container Engine. Additionally, Oracle Linux is available to over 400,000 Oracle enterprise customers and the more than 100,000 customers who have relied on Commvault technology and are looking to leverage Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to protect their mission-critical data.
Zerto Customers Lead DR-to-Cloud Trend with Rapid Adoption of Azure
Global Azure Adoption Doubles in 1H 2020 Across Several Verticals; Zerto Triples IT Resilience Footprint Across Federal Government and Public Sectors with New Customer Acquisitions
BOSTON – September 1, 2020 – Zerto, an industry leader for IT resilience, today announced cloud technology trends and positive growth among its customer base for the first half of 2020. Zerto’s customers are pursuing the disaster recovery (DR)-to-cloud trend with rapid global adoption of Microsoft Azure. Additionally, Zerto has tripled its global IT Resilience footprint across the federal government and public sectors with new customer acquisitions.
Azure Adoption Ascends
During the first half of 2020, global adoption of Microsoft Azure doubled across several verticals. Virtual machines protected to Azure using Zerto has doubled year-over-year with half of the consumption driven by the education, financial services, healthcare, and technology sectors.
According to Gartner, Inc., “Cloud DR costs can be a fraction of the total costs for traditional DR sites.” In the 2019 Security and Risk survey, for more than 300 IT organizations worldwide, cloud-based recovery is the most popular choice across all levels of system availability.*
Innovation in the Public Cloud
Zerto customers also expanded their adoption among other public cloud providers. Earlier this year, Zerto announced integrations with AWS Storage Gateway and introduced support for Oracle and Google Cloud. The company also continues to make it easier for customers to adopt public clouds. A joint customer, QAD, a premier supplier of ERP software took advantage of the new Google Cloud and Zerto integration.
“With Google Cloud VMware Engine, we are able to quickly extend the enterprise class disaster recovery capabilities we have become accustomed to with Zerto to the Google Cloud,” says Scott Lawson, Director, IT architecture at QAD.
IT Resilience Footprint Grows
Zerto expanded its IT Resilience Platform footprint by more than 200% with new customers in the federal government and public sector in the first half of 2020. Additionally, Zerto experienced more than 200% increase in customer project implementation sizes among the legal, software and internet, and telecommunications sectors.
Key growth highlights include:
New customers in the federal government sector increased by more than 250%.
New customers in the public sector increased by 225%.
New customers in the insurance industry increased by 18% with the average customer project implementation size increasing by 20%.
The average new customer project implementation size in the legal and telecommunications industries nearly doubled.
The average new customer project implementation size in the software and internet industry more than tripled.
The average new customer project implementation size in financial services increased by 30%.
Customer Successes and Wins
In the 1H 2020, Zerto customers continued to build IT resilience and achieve results across multiple sectors and use cases:
Ritchie Bros., a global asset management and disposition company, leveraged Zerto to simplify DR, gain more control, and support data center migrations. To learn more, read the Ritchie Bros. case study here.
A leading chemical corporation leveraged Zerto to move DR operations to the Azure cloud and achieved new operational efficiencies. To learn more, click here.
A regional credit union strengthened its IT resilience by adopting a multi-cloud DR strategy using Zerto with both Azure and AWS. To learn more, click here.
New global customers using Zerto with Azure include Cairn Energy PLC, City of SeaTac, Grey County, and KIK Custom Products.
“We serve the people of Grey County, and because data serves the people, it needs to be available 24/7,” said Evan Davis of Grey County. “Zerto enabled us to easily make the move to Azure for more resilience. Now we have peace of mind that we can recover our data easily even in the midst of a disruption.”
ZertoCON was all About the Customer!
During ZertoCON 2020 Virtual Event in June, several customers spoke about their experiences and success with Zerto. Click here to access the following on-demand speaker sessions:
Rich Bailey, VP of IT operations, PruittHealth discusses “A Customer’s Guide to DR in the Cloud with Zerto and Microsoft Azure.”
Rodney Carlson, systems analyst, Horizon Bank shares his experience in “Modernize Your Backup with Zerto.”
Kent Pollard, senior technical architect, IFDS discusses “IT Resilience for Kubernetes and Containers.”
Jayme Williams, senior systems engineer, TenCate shares “A Tale of Two Ransomware Attacks: TenCate Uses Zerto to Recover from Ransomware in Minutes.”
In June, Zerto also honored KIND Snacks as the inaugural IT Resilience Innovator , a program that highlights IT leaders in disaster recovery, data protection, and cloud that are striving to protect their business from disruption.
“Organizations are increasingly recognizing that building IT resilience and leveraging the cloud for DR is critical not only for IT operations and business continuity but also for simplicity, greater efficiencies, and control,” said Coley Burke, CRO of Zerto. “We’re excited to see the momentum for our IT Resilience Platform across federal and public sectors and look forward to bolstering IT resilience across all customers for the second half of 2020.”
* Gartner, What I&O Leaders Need to Know About Disaster Recovery to the Cloud, Nik Simpson, 27 November 2019
About Zerto
Zerto helps customers accelerate IT transformation by reducing the risk and complexity of modernization and cloud adoption. By replacing multiple legacy solutions with a single IT Resilience Platform, Zerto is changing the way disaster recovery, data protection and cloud are managed. With enterprise scale, Zerto’s software platform delivers continuous availability for an always-on customer experience while simplifying workload mobility to protect, recover and move applications freely across hybrid and multi-clouds. Zerto is trusted globally by over 8,000 customers, works with more than 1,500 partners and is powering resiliency offerings for 450 managed services providers. Learn more at Zerto.com.
Zerto to Transform Global Data Protection Market by Offering Continuous Data Protection to All Application Tiers
Delivering on customers’ need for always-on business, continuous journaling eliminates the need for legacy snapshot-based backup solutions
Boston, June 10, 2020 – Zerto, an industry leader for IT resilience, today at ZertoCON announced its plans to transform the global data protection market by opening up the benefits of its continuous data protection (CDP) through a single platform to all application tiers. Built to address customers’ need for always-on business, Zerto’s software-only IT Resilience Platform will provide best-in-class, cost-effective resilience for all applications across mission-critical, back office, and test/dev use cases. This will ensure low RPOs and RTOs without compromising on cost or application performance.
“Enterprises require data protection strategies and cost optimization models tailored to their unique needs,” commented Gil Levonai, CMO and senior vice president of product, Zerto. “Historically, top-tier, customer-facing applications would be protected with multiple data protection and disaster recovery solutions while lower-tier applications would be protected with high RPO backups only, or not protected at all. Zerto is levelling the playing field by applying its CDP technology to each of these important applications, transforming the backup market.”
Decoupling operational recovery from backup, Zerto leverages continuous journaling to eliminate the need for snapshot-based backup solutions. For decades, organizations have relied on backup technology to help solve every day, routine disruptions that require the quick restore of recent files, folders, or VMs. With Zerto’s market-leading journaling technology, these “operational recovery” use cases benefit from unmatched granularity, RPOs, and speed-of-recovery.
Innovative Capabilities Will Protect All Application Tiers
Zerto continues to innovate within its IT Resilience Platform, with new capabilities in forthcoming releases including:
Mix and Match Architectures will allow total flexibility for a business to apply the right protection policies and cost structures to the right applications—whether on-premises, in the cloud, or next-gen—without compromising RPOs and RTOs for operational recovery. The flexibility of a software-only architecture, one-to-many replication, local and remote journaling, long-term repositories, and both short-term and long-term retention policies will give companies the flexibility to meet business service level agreements and cost constraints.
In-Cloud Data Protection and Disaster Recovery enables protection of applications across regions and zones for true cloud-native resilience, whether in AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Microsoft Azure. Zerto will extend its platform to offer unparalleled simplicity and orchestration across all use cases, whether recent data restores due to user error or disaster recovery from an infrastructure outage, for both cloud-first businesses and businesses just starting their cloud journey.
Optimized Tiering to Cloud utilizing native cloud object storage for long-term retention offers both cost and recovery speed benefits. Zerto will offer native support for efficient, cost-effective public cloud storage as a long-term retention target with built-in data reduction technology.
New Workflows simplify file or VM restores back to production from a local or remote journal, enabling maximum flexibility.
Automated Data Protection with policy-driven management, allows IT to simplify operations and reduce overhead using VM auto-protection and Zerto’s data-rich, API-first analytics platform.
Additional Features include added encryption and security, automatic VRA lifecycle management for maintenance, features for our managed service providers, new Zerto Analytics functionality, an improved licensing mechanism, and many more.
Accelerating Business Resilience and Digital Transformation
“By deploying Zerto’s single IT Resilience Platform for all applications, IT departments can ensure business resilience and focus on their digital transformation initiatives,” added Levonai. “This transformation of people and processes ensures that IT resilience is seamless, automated, and consistently repeatable, enabling the business to move fast, be agile, disrupt the market, and never themselves be disrupted.”
Zerto’s cost optimization across tiers lowers TCO by providing businesses flexible architectures, SLA policies, and storage choices. It also offers huge IT efficiencies by reducing time-to-recovery and hours wasted on restoring out-of-date data from backups. The software-only platform is hardware and storage agnostic, enabling maximum flexibility to allow enterprises to choose the right infrastructure for their business without any constraints.
This flexibility allows IT departments to eliminate multiple tools and tedious manual processes to better align IT resources, while end-to-end data protection minimizes data loss and downtime with unbeatable RPOs and RTOs.
About Zerto
Zerto helps customers accelerate IT transformation by reducing the risk and complexity of modernization and cloud adoption. By replacing multiple legacy solutions with a single IT Resilience Platform, Zerto is changing the way disaster recovery, data protection and cloud are managed. With enterprise scale, Zerto’s software platform delivers continuous availability for an always-on customer experience while simplifying workload mobility to protect, recover and move applications freely across hybrid and multi-clouds. Zerto is trusted globally by over 8,000 customers, works with more than 1,500 partners and is powering resiliency offerings for 450 managed services providers. Learn more at Zerto.com.
Zerto Announces Partnership with Google Cloud and Deeper Integration with Azure, AWS and VMware
Boston, March 24, 2020 – Zerto, an industry leader for IT resilience, today announced the general availability of Zerto 8.0, expanding disaster recovery, data protection, and mobility for hybrid and multi-cloud environments with strategic partners. Zerto 8.0 introduces new integration with Google Cloud, deeper integrations with Azure, AWS public cloud platforms, and new innovations with VMware.
“With Zerto 8.0, our mission is to deliver IT resilience everywhere, by introducing a range of new and powerful features along with deeper integration with market-leading public cloud providers. We give customers the protection they want, wherever they need it,” explained Ziv Kedem, CEO of Zerto. “Zerto has been moving the dial on resilience for the past decade, and the ongoing development and wider integration of our platform shows the importance of technology leadership in an era where businesses can never stand still on data protection and recovery.”
Zerto 8.0 brings unrivalled data protection and mobility for hybrid, multi-cloud environments with a range of new, innovative features and capabilities:
New support for Google Cloud by bringing its leading Continuous Data Protection (CDP) technology to Google Cloud’s VMware-as-a-Service offering. Zerto 8.0 will support VMware on Google Cloud, enabling users to protect and migrate native VMware workloads in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with Zerto’s leading RTOs, RPOs and workload mobility.
New cost savings, operational efficiencies and visibility with support for VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols).
Expanded VMware vCloud Director (vCD) connection with Zerto’s self-service recovery portal for Managed Service Providers (MSP).
Deeper integration with Microsoft Azure for increased simplicity and scalability of large deployments, which includes support for Microsoft Hyper-V Gen 2 VMs, users leveraging UEFI for VMs running in their on-premises environments can now use Microsoft Azure as a target for disaster recovery, without a need to convert the VMs to legacy formats.
AWS Storage Gateway to be used as a target site for inexpensive and efficient cloud archive and data protection.
New data protection capabilities, extending the value of Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs) to data protection, delivering application consistency from seconds to years.
A single pane of glass for data protection reporting with status performance and capacity reporting of protected workloads.
Zerto’s failback functionality as part of the cost-effective incremental snapshots of Azure managed disks is now available across ALL regions.
New unified alert management with prioritized views of critical alerts and customization for users to receive the alerts exactly when needed for critical operations.
New impact analysis capability to mitigate risk to an organization’s protected and unprotected environment for on-premises or cloud.
New resource planning view of Unprotected VM’s for better insight into an organizations’ unprotected VMs.
Additional features to automate and streamline the processes for failover and configuration in the public cloud with automated OS configuration, automatic failback configuration and more.
Additionally, Zerto 8.0 lays the foundation for the future of data protection, replacing traditional snapshot-based backup with low RPO journal-based “operational recovery,” enabling enterprises to perform day-to-day granular recovery quickly.
“We’re excited to partner with Zerto and to integrate its capabilities in disaster recovery and backup with Google Cloud,” said Manvinder Singh, Director, Partnerships at Google Cloud. “Zerto’s expertise in supporting and securing VMware workloads in the cloud will be a benefit to organizations that are increasingly running mission-critical workloads on Google Cloud.”
“Zerto support for VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) helps our mutual customers protect their digital infrastructure,” said Lee Caswell, VP Marketing, HCI BU, VMware. “As an Advanced tier Technology Alliance Partner, Zerto is helping customers realize the unique VMware ability to offer consistent storage policy-based management across traditional storage and hyperconverged infrastructure.”
“At Coyote, the security and protection of our customers’ data is our top priority,” said Brian Work, Chief Technology Officer, Coyote. “We take every precaution to keep their information safe, and our work with Zerto is a perfect example of this. Our mutual focus on data protection allows us to offer our customers the innovative tech solutions they need with the security they require.”
Zerto helps customers accelerate IT transformation by reducing the risk and complexity of modernization and cloud adoption. By replacing multiple legacy solutions with a single IT Resilience Platform, Zerto is changing the way disaster recovery, data protection and cloud are managed. With enterprise scale, Zerto’s software platform delivers continuous availability for an always-on customer experience while simplifying workload mobility to protect, recover and move applications freely across hybrid and multi-clouds. Zerto is trusted globally by over 8,000 customers, works with more than 1,500 partners and is powering resiliency offerings for 450 managed services providers. Learn more at Zerto.com.
VMware, vSphere, VMware Cloud Director, and VMware Virtual Volumes are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions.
I have previously written about Vembu BDR Suite, so lets go into a little more detail.
Vembu BDR Suite is a server based suite of packages integrated behind a single intuitive web console. once installed, logging onto the server gives a landing page with 4 common tasks, adding Virtualization servers, be it Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware, adding windows machines, and a link for files and applications
OK, so lets explore the menus a little. Dashboard shows a nice at-a-glance display of active and recent jobs, and the storage pools/quotas and their use. Exactly as you would want for a centralized backup system, how much space do we have, and are backups running and completing successfully.
Moving onto the Backup tab, we see a duplication of the options displayed on the landing screen, and an additional “list jobs” link
Under VMreplication we have a link to the add/manage Vsphere servers. configuration for failover and failback (covered in an interesting post here)
Under Tape Backup we have menus for configuring tape infrastructure where tape servers can be added and configured, and jobs scheduled.
Recovery takes you to a page listing (when populated) the machines that are backed up, allowing you to drive down by machine to individual backups, subsequently allowing recovery to be performed, be it file, disk, or machine level.
Reports menu group together the backup status and image integrity reports as well as configuring email reports if desired.
Management allows you to configure may aspects of the DBR suite, providing access to a credentials manager, data encryption, offsite copies, among others as well as virtual drive management for presenting backups in a user accessible manner.
Finally settings present time zone, email configurations and software updates and authorization (for managing access to the server).
Vembu BDR’s web console is an intuitive and self-explanatory interface, whilst not presenting an overwhelming or confusing array of options, it successfully provides access to them in a easy and concise manner.
If I were working in an organization utilizing Vembu in a support role I would definitely have the web console dashboard as one of my home tabs in my browser.
One of the most appealing functionalities of Vembu BDR was the ability to back up stand-alone windows machines, and should the need occur, recover a backed up machine to a virtual machine, thus offering a easy route to migrating physical servers or workstations to a virtual machine. I have a spare windows box, so lets see how simple the process is
So after installing Vembu BDR suite trial on my desktop, lets connect to the server web console.
from the dashboard backup drop-down menu select microsoft windows
greats you with a self explanatory add Microsoft windows host page.
Adding the target machines DNS name and adding administrator credentials via the Add credentials button:
this has a convenient free test field to add a description for the machine, clicking save returns you to the previous screen with your added credentials selected. Clicking add host prompts you for confirmation?
After confirming, and a short delay, the windows host has been added to Vembu and you are dropped into the manage host screen:
So far so good, a standalone windows 10 machine has been added to Vembu with little hassle. Lets continue on and backup, clicking the backup button by the host takes you into a new wizzard. As its a newly added machine we get a warning about the Vembu image backup driver not being installed
Clicking on “click here to install” provokes a warning that it will result in the reboot of the host.
clicking on ok installs the driver on the host and causes it to reboot, so after a brief pause for the remote machine to reboot, the wizard continues with a drive selection screen
Wanting to do a complete backup i selected all physical volumes.
this provoked a warning that the system drive didn’t have a drive letter assigned:
selecting ok assigns a drive letter and selects the drives, clicking next moves onto the “Guest Processing” tab, which allows the selection of application aware processing, to enable Vembu to track critical applications such as AD/Exchange and ensure consistency of data backed up.
whilst the machine used in this example isn’t running any of these applications i thought it worthwhile to enable application aware processing for this test. Next moves us onto the scheduling tab, where we can set a schedule for regular backups and aditional full backups.
configured to my liking, with a full backup enabled, we move on to the settings screen, where retention policies encryption and storage pool to be used for this backup can be configured
Moving on to the final screen, we can name the backup job and review and confirm settings, as well as configure the job to run immediately after saving.
This gives an intermediary confirmation that the backup schedule has been saved, clicking ok, confirms and causes the backup to start running.
dropping back to the jobs screen, with a small green triangle to indicate the backup is running
after a few minutes (depending on amount of data and network/storage speed) the job completes.
going into reports we can see the successful backup.
Now a backup is only as good as its restoration, and is useless if we can’t restore it. Lets look at a restore in part 2.
At the end of last year, we were approached by Vembu technologies about producing some content for them, now to be honest they are not a company I have had any experience with and I wasn’t aware of their products.
So as would any self-respecting admin/Blogger would do, I paid a visit to their website to see what the deal is and headed over to their about section, which has the following to say:
“Vembu is a leading provider of a portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses for more than a decade. Vembu’s vision is to make software and cloud services very affordable for the hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses worldwide.
Vembu’s flagship offering is the BDR Suite of products meant for on-premise, offsite, cloud backup and disaster recovery across diverse IT environments including physical, virtual, applications and endpoints.
Since 2002, Vembu’s industry-recognized data protection solutions have delivered tangible value to more than 60,000 businesses worldwide through a network of 4000+ partners (MSPs/VARs & Resellers).”
Standard Fare, but promising. now what really caught my eye was their Philosophy:
“We are not gifted. We work hard.
We want a better tomorrow. We try even harder.
Nothing comes perfect the first time. We persist.
Nothing special about us. We want our work to be special.
It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about sincerity of purpose.”
This resonated well with me, struck me as an organisation willing to work with its customers and seek continual improvement.
OK stage 2, download and install a free trial, and have a play.
Now, i filled in my details (using my personal account and not my Vbrainstorm account) but before the trial had even completed downloading, my phone rang, and it was Vembu customer services ringing to schedule a product demo! This seriously impressed and showed excellent communication, and made me feel like I was a valued potential customer.
Sure enough, at the appointed time a couple of days later I was treated to a full product rundown of their comprehensive BDRSuite. and quite frankly it left me speechless. It left me with nothing less than the impression that BDRSuite is a complete backup solution allowing you to backup any system at any level of granularity, with complete application awareness. whether physical or virtual systems. Indeed, Vembu facilitates the virtualization of physical machines, a physical machine can be backed up and visualized in a single process. Indeed, any failed hardware that is backed up through BDRSuite can be booted in a virtual machine either to recover data or take the place of the failed hardware in a matter of seconds.
From my time in IT support, when large scale virtualization was in its infancy and Big Data was a new term, BDR seems like a solution to a broad range of problems, and is a product that interests me.
Product screenshots:
Dashboard, showing very simple clearly understandable user interface.
Interface for adding Vmware Vcenter server to the backups
Interface for adding physical windows machine to the backups
BDRSuite gives the first impression of being the holy grail of backups, comprehensive and simple to use, I look forward to playing with its functionality!
Stay tuned for some more in-depth product evaluations
VMware Metro Storage Clusters running on top of 3PAR StoreServ storage have gotten an added boost of automation. HP announced 3PAR OS 3.1.2 MU2 during HP Discover two weeks back and one of the features that it introduced is a quorum witness node to assist in Peer Persistence installations. Peer Persistence is the HP 3PAR StoreServ’s version of metro clustered storage for VMware, providing transparent failover of storage from one array to another. With the introduction of the quorum witness, the administrator no longer has to start the failover manually and the witness server adds monitoring and remediation in the event of an outage.
The quorum witness is a separate virtual or physical machine that monitors the availability of both arrays in each site. In most configurations, it should sit in a third site monitoring the two 3PAR arrays. If one of the sites goes down or offline, it detects the status and begins failover on the remaining 3PAR StoreServ array. Because the 3PAR StoreServ uses ALUA to block and open the active IO paths, the failover is seamless to the VMware workloads. All of this is accomplished by using the same virtual volume world wide name on both arrays and by blocking IO to the secondary copy.
Source: HP
During HP Discover, I was able to talk with several HP engineers about the new feature and one of my initial concerns was whether this is an all or nothing configuration for automated failover. Fellow blogger, Justin Vashisht, confirmed that each virtual volume or group of virtual volumes can be controlled automatically or manually – the administrator has the choice when configuring the volumes.
When we purchased our 3PAR StoreServ arrays earlier this year, our sales team confirmed that the automated failover would be forthcoming and so, as a customer, this is a feature we are happy to see delivered quickly. One of the unknowns to us was how HP would architect the quorum witness, but in talking with Siamak Nazari, an HP Fellow and chief software architect of HP Storage division, HP adapted the 3PAR Storage Processors to also do the duty of quorum witness. This means the new feature is based upon what should be solid and field-tested code.
Nazari and David Scott, HP Storage Senior Vice President and General Manager, stopped by the bloggers area at HP Discover for a coffeetalk with a large group of us. One of the things that I found most interesting from the talk is that HP has somewhat future-proofed the 3PAR StoreServ arrays it is already shipping – by baking in additional capabilities into the ASIC and by activating those with software at later time. That leaves hope that there will be other new capabilities introduced for existing customers, although nothing specific was revealed to us.
When I first discussed the Peer Persistence feature on my blog earlier this year, I praised the simplicity of the solution both from an architectural and administrative standpoint. While advancing the features in the new release, I think that HP has also made a wise choice to keep things simple even with the quorum witness added to the mix. As an administrator, I appreciate the straight forward and easy to understand (and troubleshoot) approach of the solution.
Another welcome feature for GUI fans, HP has introduced control of Peer Persistence under the Remote Copy tools within the 3PAR Management Console GUI. This means that administrators now have the choice of configuring and initiating failover from within the GUI, though I think I still prefer the single command-line command.
And as of the time of writing, HP reports that 3PAR Peer Persistence is VMware Metro Storage Clustering certified, although I do not see it in the VMware compatibility matrix yet. Lots of great incremental improvements to the 3PAR StoreServ line with this new OS revision.
Disclosure: HP sponsored my trip to HP Discover, covering all travel expenses, however HP does not control the content of the posts that I write based on my attendance to the show. The thoughts, impressions and information contained in this post are my own.
