Recoverpoint 4.0 – Efficient, faster and … virtual!

EMC has just announced a new version of RecoverPoint – 4.0. With this new version comes a truckload of new and exciting features. I will not cover all these features but will instead pick out a couple of features that score high on my list. But first of all: what is RecoverPoint and why should you consider replicating with it?

The RecoverPoint family replicates block data on a SAN/storage level. It can do both local replication inside an array or remote replication to another array. There are multiple flavours of RecoverPoint (SE, EX, CL): which one you need depends on the size of your environment and the storage systems you are using. The strong point of RecoverPoint is that it offers continuous replication instead of only the traditional asynchronous or synchronous replication.

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CLARiiON CX3 vault drive failure

Yesterday I received a call about a drive failure in a CLARiiON CX3-80 storage array. Since every system has at least a couple of hot spares configured, usually this does not pose a problem. But this drive failure happened on drive position 0_0_0: a vault drive failure.

The vault drives host (amongst others) the operating system and configuration of the storage array. They are also used to destage the write cache in case of an event that might threaten data integrity.

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