Disaster recovery ranks high on almost every organization’s IT priority list. Keeping systems up and operational with full transactional consistency in today’s economic and business climate is vital. Application downtime or data loss can not only be costly, it can drive a business to failure.
Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines are highly available, manageable and mobile. In the same way, Hitachi Data Systems storage virtualization products are highly available, manageable and mobile, allowing organizations to share data between physical and virtualized servers while enabling business agility and transparent business continuity.
Deploying the Hitachi Storage Cluster for Hyper-V solution on a virtualized storage platform allows users to extend the benefits of Hitachi Storage Cluster for Hyper-V to the entire virtualized storage pool for disaster recovery optimization.
Hitachi Storage Cluster for Hyper-V supports applications workloads for SQL, Exchange and SharePoint Server providing an integrated disaster recovery solution for the most demanding environments.
Hitachi Data Systems / Microsoft Disaster Recovery Solution
The Hitachi Data Systems/ Microsoft Disaster Recovery Solution is based on Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V, a powerful new business continuity and disaster recovery solution for medium, large and enterprise-scale Microsoft virtualized environments.
The solution, available through Hitachi Data Systems Global Solution Services, combines Microsoft virtualization and clustering software with proven Hitachi hardware and software, enabling true automated fail over and fail back of Hyper-V virtual machines and their associated data locally for business continuity purposes or across geographically dispersed sites for fail safe disaster recovery.
This flexibility allows organizations to tailor Hitachi Storage Cluster for Hyper-V to specific IT and business objectives and, ultimately extend the reach of their business continuity/disaster recovery efforts to additional applications and business locations for maximum availability and protection.
The Hitachi Storage Cluster for Hyper-V solution consists of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise or Data Center with Hyper-V technology, Hitachi Storage Cluster, and Hitachi TrueCopy® or Hitachi Universal Replicator software.
Windows Server 2008 Enterprise or Data Center with Hyper-V technology: Windows Server 2008 is the heart of the solution. It leverages key services and roles to enable a highly available and reliable virtual infrastructure, including:
Hyper-V: Microsoft’s hypervisor-based server virtualization technology.
Failover Clustering: Microsoft Failover Clustering is the cornerstone of Quick Migration and is the critical failover component for the virtual server infrastructure.
Server Core support: Server Core is a minimal server installation option for computers running on the Windows Server 2008 operating system and is the preferred platform for deploying production Hyper-V environments.
Hitachi Storage Cluster: Hitachi Storage Cluster solution integrates Hyper-V Quick Migration with Hitachi replication technologies. This integration enables simple and reliable remote replication with automated failover and failback capabilities within a Hyper-V virtual environment.
Hitachi TrueCopy® and Hitachi Universal Replicator: The Hitachi system-based replication software is used to transport data between local or geographically dispersed sites.
How Hitachi Storage Cluster for Hyper-V Works
From a high level, Hitachi Storage Cluster for Hyper-V extends Microsoft Quick Migration functionality to remote sites, allowing users to replicate virtual machines and their associated data across metropolitan and geographically separate sites. The solution enables automated failover and failback, a current—and important—differentiator in the market that supports Windows Server Core natively, which streamlines deployment in Microsoft environments.
From an architectural standpoint, Hitachi Storage Cluster for Hyper-V integrates proven enterprise-class Hitachi replication software with Microsoft failover clustering to enable off site virtual machine failover and failback capabilities. Hitachi Storage Cluster manages the replication of data from the primary data site to the remote recovery and as well as the direction of replication flow between local or geographically dispersed sites. Hitachi system-based replication software—Hitachi TrueCopy or Hitachi Universal Replicator—do the actual physical transport of data between sites.
Hitachi TrueCopy provides synchronous replication for business continuity purposes; Hitachi Universal Replicator provides asynchronous replication for disaster recovery purposes. Hitachi TrueCopy is supported on Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage family and Hitachi Universal Storage Platform™ systems; Hitachi Universal Replicator on the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform only.
