EMC RecoverPoint For VMs: Enabling a More Active Role in Data Protection for VM Admins

Whether you are dealing with a natural disaster, or an Alpaca Stampede (as Stephen has apparently witnessed before) it is important that the IT team to not only deliver robust high-performing services to application teams, but to also enable trust. Being able to do this in the form of robust “use case optimized” data protection services, assures the business that its mission critical data is protected and resides in the optimal place, even during a major disaster scenario. 

Introducing RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines…

Let’s talk a little more tactically on how we are enabling you to build that trust with your virtualization admins. Here at VMworld yesterday, EMC took the wraps off of RecoverPoint for VMs, which is a new product, designed for optimized and robust Disaster Recovery (DR) and Operational Recovery (OR) at the virtual machine level. Orchestration and management is easily performed from within the VMware Management Interface plug-in no separate UI required.

RecoverPoint for VMs is part of the EMC RecoverPoint Product family. For those of you familiar with RecoverPoint this new offering leverages many of the same industry-leading underpinning technologies. While it is a net new product offering, it is based on industry proven and tested code.

photo1For a detailed overview video on RecoverPoint for VMs and how it is implemented, click here.

VM Protection Managed Through VMware vSphere…

When delivering trust to application admins, or in this specific case virtualization admins, being able to deliver an orchestration framework that those admins are familiar with goes a long way towards acceptance and adoption of the solution. This is the philosophy we adhered to when designing the workflow model for RecoverPoint for VMs. All management and orchestration of the solution is handled via the vSphere Web Based UI. This is the same interface used to manage the production VM infrastructure. In my opinion, the virtual infrastructure management interface is the optimal place to perform disaster recovery operations for production VM DR.

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As shown in the screenshot above, to protect a VM, you simply are one right click away from an intuitive wizard to enable synchronous or asynchronous protection.

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This wizard-based workflow is designed throughout all operations within RecoverPoint for VMs to bring fool proof not only to policy configuration but run book VM Failover and Fail-back operations.

For a detailed look at management of RecoverPoint for VMs within vSphere and how it is implemented, click here.

Flexible Protection Fit for a Variety of Virtualized Applications…

Today’s application environment hosted on VMware infrastructure is certainly not cookie cutter by any means. Each user’s application infrastructure is different even when using common application frameworks. For example, an application can have a database component as well as a front-end component hosted on completely separate VMs. When protecting VMs hosting these applications, consistent restore points or bookmarks can be incredibly helpful when executing a DR plan and bringing these applications online.

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RecoverPoint for VMs addresses this flexibility by introducing Consistency Group Sets or CG Sets. These CG Sets allow admins to group individual consistency groups together and provide consistent bookmarking across Consistency Groups. Failover, Test Copy, and Failback operations can all be performed at the CG Set level as well.

When performing disaster recovery it is about getting the application end-to-end back online as quickly as possible. Having consistent bookmarks across CGs can be the difference between DR bliss and a DR nightmare.

This is the first release of RecoverPoint for VMs on very exciting roadmap of features and functionality that is planned for VM and Hybrid Cloud Data Protection. Our philosophy of providing robust and feature rich data protection in the Software Defined Datacenter will continue as we look to not only deliver high performing, but reliable and trusted data protection which can easily be optimized for your specific application workload environment.

About the Author: Alex Almeida