EMC RecoverPoint – Introduction
In todays post I would like to write few words about EMC RecoverPoint product. I will start with talking a little bit about data protection and data availability in general. Why is so? Let’s refresh it to better understand when RecoverPoint might be a useful tool in your environment.
Data Protection and Availability
I’m sure I don’t have to explain why Data Protection and Availability is important topic. Just imagine what would happen if you have data loss in your environment. But what are the ways we can secure from Data loss? Is the data loss the only concern? What about file-system corruption? Human errors? Disaster Recovery? Business continuity plan? Indeed – this topic cannot be covered by “make a back-up once a week”. On the other hand there is a financial problem. Most of data protection and availability solutions are pretty much expensive.
About RecoverPoint
EMC RecoverPoint in a nutshell is a block-level solution to provide local and remote replication. As a consequence it allows:
- local data protection – for operational and application recovery needs. Continous data protection (CDP) – continously captures and stores data modifications and enables point-in-time recovery with no data loss.
- remote data protection – for disaster recovery purposes. Continous remote replication (CRR) – supports sync and a-sync replication betwen remote sites over FC or WAN. With RecoverPoint a-sync replication provieds crash-consistent protection and recovery to a specific point-in-time (preferably very small RPO). With sync replication through FC – zero RPO.
- mix of the both above – replication of data within the same site and to the remote site. Concurrent local and remote replication (CLR).
RecoverPoint Replication options
Besides use cases that I already mentioned, RecoverPoint can be used also to replicate data for isolated test and development purposes, or to replicate data during technology refresh. If you have EMC VPLEX in the environment you can even use Storage Arrays from different vendors (such as NetApp, HP or Hitachi). It is used for Operational Recovery – to protect data against errors or attacks – with CDP you can actually revert the image of the filesystem to the previous state which was healthy.
RecoverPoint System
RecoverPoint is quite complex system with many components included. I describe it with separate post- EMC RecoverPoint – Architecture.