Modernize Your Data Protection with SnapMirror Synchronous

As you navigate your digital transformation journey, you must constantly modernize your data protection architecture. For business continuity and disaster recovery, today’s organizations require the following capabilities in a data protection solution:

• Zero data loss (zero RPO), especially important for mission-critical application data, by replicating each I/O as opposed to traditional point-in-time backup methods using space-efficient snapshots.
• Zero time taken to recover data (zero RTO), for operational, compliance, and customer experience reasons. Applications must fail over to secondary storage without requiring restart or host reconfiguration—as simply as “flip-flop” failover/failback and even granular failover (at the volume level).
• A hypervisor-centric approach to taking application-consistent snapshots, being able to manage replicas, and taking advantage of the compelling economics of virtualization.
• Harnessing the power of the cloud (capability of disk-disk, disk-cloud, or disk-disk-cloud backup) to provide data protection across platforms and environments.

IT demands are changing rapidly, requiring the ability to rapidly repurpose and reconfigure data centers. Multiple or new management tools are not an option. Customers are asking for a single business continuity solution that meets all requirements—from small numbers of volumes and single applications to entire large clusters and multisite environments.

In today’s digital world, loss of vital business data can cripple a company; any downtime can have serious repercussions to the organization’s financial performance and competitive advantage. To safeguard data from loss due to natural disaster, fire, application failure, or software malfunction, you can use NetApp^® SnapMirror^® Synchronous (SM-S) replication software. SM-S is a volume-granular, synchronous data replication engine introduced in NetApp ONTAP^® 9.5 data management software. With SM-S, you can achieve zero RPO and very low RTO across a data center, LAN, or metropolitan area network (MAN).

Here’s how SM-S replication works:

1. After the synchronous protection relationship is set up between source and destination volumes, any application I/O from the host in the primary site is intercepted by the splitter. (The splitter sends the I/O to both primary and secondary storage systems over the interconnect replication network.)
2. The storage system in the secondary site commits the transaction to NVRAM and immediately sends an acknowledgment to the storage system in the primary site. The primary site commits to its own NVRAM
3. Both NVRAMs then get flushed to disk at the consistency point (CP) periodically.
4. The primary storage system sends an acknowledgment to the host, reporting a successful operation. Both arrays process the transaction before an acknowledgment is sent to the host, so that both arrays are always in sync.

Creating an SM-S Relationship

The relationship between the volumes in primary and secondary storage systems is called a data protection relationship. Use the following procedure to create a data protection relationship.

Before you begin:

• All nodes in the primary and secondary storage systems must be on ONTAP 9.5 or later.
• SnapMirror needs to be licensed on the primary and secondary storage systems, as part of the Premium bundle.
• The primary and secondary clusters and storage virtual machines (SVMs) must be peered.

Steps:

1) In ONTAP System Manager in the primary cluster, click Storage > Volumes.

Serving Data from a Secondary Storage System if the Primary Storage System Fails

1. Click Protection > Volume Relationships.
2. Highlight the SnapMirror Synchronous relationship, and then select Operations > Quiesce.

1. Mount the NAS volume to the namespace using the same junction path that the source volume was mounted to in the source SVM.
2. Apply the appropriate access control lists (ACLs) to the NFS shares at the destination volume.
3. Assign the NFS export policies to the destination volume.
4. Apply the quota rules to the destination volume.
5. Redirect clients to the destination volume.
6. Remount the NFS shares on the clients.

1. Map the LUNs in the volume to the appropriate initiator group.
2. For iSCSI, create iSCSI sessions from the SAN host initiators to the SAN LIFs.
3. On the SAN client, rescan disks to detect the connected LUNs.
4. Attach the database files so that you can use them.

Meet Your Business Continuity Goals with SM-S