As more and more companies virtualize their mission critical workloads, administrators are faced with the challenge of how to keep these applications highly available in the event of a power outage, natural disaster or some other scenario that will result in downtown for these applications. Replicating data across physical locations can be challenging depending on the distance, available bandwidth, technologies used to replicate (at the VM level, server and\or storage), how much data to replicate, the recovery time objects and how much data needs to be recovered. Technologies like Live Migration simplify the process for moving active virtual machines without any downtime but Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) and replicating shared volumes across long distances can be a real challenge.
EMC VPLEX is a federated storage solution that helps eliminate some of the challenges with replicating data across distances by eliminating the need to configure storage replication. VPLEX virtualizes the storage layer by presenting EMC or non-EMC LUNs and making them available across datacenters. In other words, a storage LUN is available to servers located across two different physical sites. Add in Hyper-V Live Migration and you immediately have a highly available scenario without making any storage replication schedules or processes! While VPLEX Metro provides mobility and availability of the storage arrays across a synchronous distance, VPLEX Geo extends storage to asynchronous distances.
At EMC World last month, EMC announced the availability of VPLEX Geo and released a white paper showing how VPLEX can be used with Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration to migrate virtual workloads (using mission critical applications based on SAP) with no downtime across long distances. Want to learn more? Be sure to read the white paper located on EMC.com as well as a customer success story highlighting this solution in production.
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