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In addition to the hardware based protection built into Mercury and Titan’s architecture such as redundant components and RAID, BlueArc provides a comprehensive suite of Data Protection Information Services. At a high level these include: active/active local, campus and extended clustering for high availability, instant file system recovery from snapshots, multiple checkpoints for file system rollback, synchronous and asynchronous replication, and integrated anti-virus and backup. These numerous protection methodologies together protect against all threat profiles to include logical, physical and site outages.
Clustering of up to 8 active/active nodes increases system availability by shortening planned and un-planned recovery times. In the rare event that a node within the cluster ceases to function properly, the remaining nodes seamlessly assume all functions of the failed node. Virtual servers are automatically migrated to a functional node with corresponding policy information while mapping to virtual machines is maintained. This means that all data is accessible from any node in the cluster – up to 100k distant for extended campuses. Additionally, BlueArc has recently decreased cluster failover times by ensuring that replay and file system recovery functions are performed concurrently. Also, rolling cluster upgrades allow for each cluster in a node to perform sequential, minor firmware updates without disruption or downtime. Each cluster is simply updated in round robin fashion until all nodes are running the same version.
BlueArc’s snapshot functionality creates a cumulative history of data without duplication, using references to create different views of the file system. Administrators can create an automated schedule that can be integrated into data migration, replication and backup policies. Also, a high degree of recovery point granularity is maintained with up to 1,024 snapshots per volume available. File System Recover from Snapshot (FSRS) is a feature that restores a file system directly from a snapshot in a matter of seconds. The snapshot upon which the recovery is based can be selected from a snap that was taken for a backup, data migration or an arbitrary time selected by the system administrator. If corruption is suspected, an administrator may elect to run “chkfs” on a snapshot to validate the snapshot before it is used to restore a file system.
A complimentary feature to FSRS is Multiple Checkpoints for file system rollback. Whereas FSRS is most appropriate for event based protection, check pointing increases recovery point granularity. Checkpoints are written to the file system every 2-5 seconds as the disk cache is flushed, creating a rollback window of approximately 10 minutes. If there is an error writing data or problem with the file system, the administrator can roll back the file system up to 128 checkpoints.
Synchronous and asynchronous replication provides the highest level of protection against threats to the application, system, and data center. BlueArc’s multi-stream replication features allow administrators to create one or more identical copies of data while keeping the source and targets synchronized. Performance is assured as multiple concurrent streams are leveraged during data transfers. This is particularly useful in environments replicating numerous small files where there tends to be significant metadata “overhead.” The use of concurrent streams to transfer the data takes advantage of BlueArc’s inherent capability to “parallelize” metadata and data access. Leveraging policy based management and automated scheduling, asynchronous replication can be conducted between file systems within the same array, storage pools or even tiers within the storage ecosystem – even if they are physically separated. In the case of synchronous replication between systems, data is copied simultaneously between both servers and storage arrays, with multiple acknowledgements. This ensures complete protection from corruption or data loss. Additionally, during the replication process, NFS and CIFS permissions are preserved for the replicated copy of data.
Data Protection Benefits Summary
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