HP StorageWorks Storage Mirroring evaluation guide (T2558-96075, February 2008)

1 - 1
1 X Introduction
Introduction
HP StorageWorks Storage Mirroring is a real-time data replication and failover software product. Storage Mirroring augments
your existing data protection strategy by reducing downtime and data loss, and it provides these services with minimal impact
on existing network and communication resources.
Storage Mirroring allows you to specify mission-critical data that must be protected and replicates, in real-time, that data from
a production server, known as the source, to a backup server, known as the target. The target server, on a local network or
at a remote site, stores the copy of the critical data from the source. Storage Mirroring monitors any changes to the critical
data and sends the changes to the target server. By replicating only the file changes rather than copying an entire file, Storage
Mirroring allows you to more efficiently use resources.
 Offsite disaster recovery services—No business is immune from the many disasters - disk crashes, power failures, human
error, natural disasters - that will inevitably stop the flow of data at one or more of your facilities. Tape-based disaster
recovery can only restore data to the point of the last backup, which was most likely the prior night. Any data created
since the last backup will be lost. An effective disaster recovery plan requires a comprehensive data protection plan,
including Storage Mirroring continuous data replication.
Storage Mirroring can be combined with your existing tape backup solution for a more comprehensive disaster recovery
plan. Storage Mirroring is a disaster recovery software based on asynchronous real-time replication and automatic
failover to provide cost-effective business continuity for Microsoft
®
Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle
®
, virtual
systems, file servers, and many other applications. Storage Mirroring provides continuous data protection by sending an
up-to-the-minute copy of the data as it is being changed to the target server. Features such as built-in bandwidth control
allows data to be replicated to a remote source, far from harms way of a disaster such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and
brown-outs. That same bandwidth control allows data to be restored within minutes.
 Local high availability services—As businesses come to increasingly depend on continuous access to their data, ensuring
that their data is available on-demand is of paramount importance. Traditional solutions, such as tape backup and
hardware mirroring, are not without flaws. Tape backup poses a potential risk in that data backups must be performed
when the system is idle, meaning that as much as a day's worth of data could be lost. Tape recovery time can also be
below many business's recovery time objectives (and does not provide high availability).
A more cost-effective answer to a high availability solution is asynchronous host-based replication for high availability.
Support for non-proprietary hardware and storage systems means you can leverage your existing resources. You will
also get real-time data protection without distance limitations, ensuring high availability for all your business-critical
applications, including e-mail. Real-time data replication at the byte level, regardless of application, is a much more
efficient use of computing and bandwidth resources for high availability. With Storage Mirroring all of your applications
can have cost-effective, real-time data protection and high availability.
 Enhanced centralized backup—The rapid growth in storage brought on by the Internet and distributed computing has
placed nearly impossible demands on administrators responsible for protecting corporate data assets. The backup
window has shrunk to nearly zero and tape backup systems can introduce significant overhead to a production server,
seriously impacting its performance. While the importance of backups increases, the impact of periodic full system
backups is obvious. Even nightly incremental backups dominate processing while they examine every file system object
and then read all files that have changed in their entirety for backup. Performing this process across a network adds
additional overhead as the entire process happens across the wire.
These days permanent point in time storage and recovery, like that provided by periodic tape backup, is required. And
despite the fact that Storage Mirroring cannot provide a way to retrieve historical file versions or files that may have
been previously deleted by users, Storage Mirroring can enhance the backup process by continuously replicating critical
data to centralized servers and using tape backup systems to backup the replica rather than the production servers.
Using Storage Mirroring offloads the burden of periodic tape backups from multiple production servers to a dedicated
backup server and makes centralized tape backup a reality, significantly reducing management cost and improving
reliability. Regardless of a file’s state on the source, on the target every file is closed and available for consistent backup at
any point in time.
Testing or Migration Server
Offsite Disaster Recovery
High Availability
Centralized
Production (Source) Servers
(Target) Server
Tape Backup
Server