Always Be Prepared: EMC Uplevels VMware Disaster Recovery with Isilon Storage Replication Adapter 2.0

EMC believes customers should take the Boy Scout motto to heart—Be Prepared. With that in mind, EMC Isilon Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) 2.0 is now generally available. This free software provides an automated solution for implementing and testing disaster recovery between geographically separated sites, and is designed for use with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM).

Isilon SRA Image

With SRA 2.0, users can build efficient and easy-to-manage business continuity and disaster recovery solutions for Isilon scale-out NAS and VMware environments. Let’s take a quick look at some of the details.

SRA 2.0 includes a number of critical new features and enhancements. To start, we’ve simplified management by eliminating the need for users to manually enter cluster credentials through the Isilon Replication Helper. This information is now automatically retrieved by SRA 2.0, freeing up your time to focus on more value-added tasks.

You’ll also find that failover and failback operations and performance have been significantly improved by leveraging innovations in the latest version of Isilon SyncIQ data replication software. These enhancements increase availability and allow recovery time objectives to be reduced. In addition, combining SRA 2.0 with the latest advancements in OneFS file clone technology has helped improve the performance of testing failover operations.

The bottom line: users have the ability to know what’s going on with their disaster recovery solutions every minute of every day.

Who isn’t looking for increased availability and simplified management? Here’s what you need to get started:

To implement your disaster recovery solution with SRA 2.0, you’ll need the Isilon OneFS 7.1 (or later) operating system with Isilon SyncIQ and SnapshotIQ software at both primary and recovery clusters. For your VMware environment, you’ll need vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1, vCenter Server 5.1 and vSphere 5.1 (or later) software. It’s also important to note that SRA 2.0 is a non-licensable product that is freely downloadable from VMware for use with SRM. You can easily access the download by visiting the VMware.com resources page.

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About the Author: Nick Kirsch