Dell EMC PowerStore Protecting Your Data
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Contents Additional Resources...................................................................................................................................................................4 1 Introduction................................................................................................................................. 5 Data protection in PowerStore............................................................................................................................................
Additional Resources As part of an improvement effort, revisions of the software and hardware are periodically released. Some functions that are described in this document are not supported by all versions of the software or hardware currently in use. The product release notes provide the most up-to-date information about product features. Contact your technical support professional if a product does not function properly or does not function as described in this document.
1 Introduction This chapter contains the following information: Topics: • • • • Data protection in PowerStore Snapshots Replication Protection policies Data protection in PowerStore There are two main ways you can protect your data using the PowerStore Manager: snapshots and replication. Snapshots are point-intime copies of a volume, volume group, virtual machine, or file system. Replication duplicates storage data to a remote system for redundancy in the event of a disaster.
Replication Data replication is a process in which storage data is duplicated to a remote system, which provides an enhanced level of redundancy in case the main storage backup system fails. Replication minimizes the downtime-associated costs of a system failure and simplifies the recovery process from a natural disaster or human error. Asynchronous remote replication for volumes and volume groups is supported. Replication is not supported on file systems. To configure replication: 1.
Associate a protection policy with a storage resource Associate a protection policy with one or more storage resources to apply the selected snapshot and replication rules to the storage resource. The protection policy automatically performs snapshot operations and replication based on the specified parameters. If a protection policy that meets your data protection requirements is available, you can associate it with a block storage resource at anytime.
2 Snapshots This chapter contains the following information: Topics: • • • • • • Snapshot rules Take a snapshot Create a thin clone Using snapshots to access hosts Refresh a storage resource Restore a storage resource from a snapshot Snapshot rules Create snapshot rules to specify the frequency of snapshot creation, and to define how long snapshots are retained before they are deleted.
With thin clones, you can establish hierarchical snapshots to preserve data over different stages of changes to the data. If the parent resource is deleted, migrated, or replicated, the thin clone is unaffected.
3 Replication This chapter contains the following information: Topics: • • • • • Remote systems Replication rules Failover Recovery point objective Synchronization Remote systems Configure a remote system connection between the source and destination systems to enable remote replication. In PowerStore, the remote system connection is associated with the replication rule. You can create a remote system connection ahead of time, or while creating a replication rule.
Failover You can fail over a replication session to change the role of the destination system to the source system. After a failover, you can access applications on the new source system to recover data. There are two types of failovers: planned and unplanned failovers. Planned failover In a planned failover, you manually fail over a replication session from the source system to the destination system.
If synchronization fails, the replication session is placed in a system paused state. When the system recovers, the replication session continues from the same point as when the system was paused.
A Use cases This chapter contains the following information: Topics: • • Snapshot and thin clone use cases Replication use cases Snapshot and thin clone use cases You can use snapshots and thin clones to restore corrupted volumes and create test environments. Snapshots are read-only copies that can be used to save the current state of an object. You can use snapshots to quickly recover data if there is corruption or user error. Snapshots cannot be directly accessed by a host.
Replication use cases You can use replication for planned downtime, such as during inter-cluster migration, the installation of a major software update, and disaster recovery. Intercluster migration If you need to migrate a storage object to another PowerStore cluster, you can set up a one-time replication between the two clusters, followed by a planned fail over to the new cluster to complete the migration. After the migration, dismantle the source object to reclaim space on the original cluster.
