HIGH RELIABILITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE DATA CENTER
BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND DATA CENTER DISTRIBUTION THROUGH HP STOREVIRTUAL VSA TECHNOLOGY
THE SOLUTIONS WE HAVE DEVELOPED
SERVER & STORAGE
BUSINESS CONTINUITY
BUSINESS CONTINUITY
INITIAL SITUATION
The customer at the time of the analysis had a traditional infrastructure, based on VMware and composed from the point of view of hardware from two hosts and a shared storage (SAN) in the main server room and a third host with local storage located in the second room technology, with replication server functions of the main servers.
The backup was managed on NAS through Symantec Backup Exec (for data copying) and Quest vRanger (for virtual machine replication).
The highlighted situation presented the following limits:
- PERFORMANCE DEGRADATION INCREASINGLY LESS SUSTAINABLE
- POOR RELIABILITY AND FAULT TOLERANCE
- OVERLY COMPLEX AND COMPLEX MANAGEMENT OF BACKUPS
- FAILURE TO INTEGRATE THE SERVICES PRESENT
- FAILURE TO EXPLOIT THE 2 SITES PRESENT
VALUE POINTS OF THE SOLUTION
- HIGH RELIABILITY AND BUSINESS CONTINUITY THANKS TO THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE DATA CENTER ON MULTIPLE HOSTS, IN DIFFERENT SITES
- INCREASED PERFORMANCE THANKS TO SSD DISKS DIRECTLY MOUNTED ON SERVER AND 10 GB INTERCONNECTION
- UNIFORM MANAGEMENT OF ALL SERVICES VIA VSPHERE
- UNIFORMITY AND IMPROVEMENT OF THE RESCUE PROCESSES THANKS TO THE TOTAL INTEGRATION BETWEEN PRIMARY STORAGE (HP STOREVIRTUAL), MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE (VEEAM) AND STORAGE STORAGE (HP STOREONCE)
ADVANTAGES OF THE SOLUTION
Mixing the reorganization of the vSphere environment to the potentiality of the HP StoreVirtual VSA technology for a uniform management of all the virtual services, it was possible to make the best use of the two separate rooms by connecting them to 10Gb, creating a vSMSC configuration (vSphere Metro Storage Cluster) ultra fast and reachable regardless of the host location. This peculiarity translates into Business Continuity at the storage level : the degree of tolerance achieved in fact allowed us to guarantee continuity and no loss of data even in the face of the simultaneous breakdown of half of the vSphere hosts (for example due to the total inaccessibility of one of the 2 sites).
With regard to backup policies, the Veeam Backup & Replication solution has made it possible to replace previous solutions, using a unique and effective tool to better manage replicas, backups and restores of the entire virtual environment. This thanks to the native possibility of making granular restores of SQL and Exchange environments and total integration with HP storage (StoreVirtual and StoreOnce): this choice has allowed for example to record, within 4 months from the start of the project, a Actual deduplication rate of 6x , thanks to which we have extended and intensified the backup time window.