Cost-effective Disaster Recovery Solutions with 3PAR
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Introduction
We have all heard the horror stories of simple mistakes that lead to costly business disasters. Having an IT disaster recovery plan is a critical business need to prevent serious financial impact, loss of customer confidence or damage to a company’s reputation. From IT hardware failure, human error to natural disasters, planning for the unknown can be difficult, but having enough funds to implement an IT disaster recovery plan can seem close to impossible.
Industry: Construction
Hardware: HPE 3PAR SAN Storage
Software: 3PAR Remote Copy
Location: Kyiv, Ukraine
Objective: Cost-effectively improve disaster recovery plan and ensure work can be resumed quickly and effectively after a disaster
The Challenge
We had a construction company get in touch that wanted a best in class SAN solution with redundancy that included a full disaster recovery solution in case their main Data Centre was to be hit by a plane or blown up! The only problem was that they didn’t have the budget for a 10Gbit connection between the two Data Centres which are geographically 100 miles apart.
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The Solution
The solution that instantly sprung to mind was HPE 3PAR! We built, configured and firmware upgraded 1x HPE 3PAR 7450c All-Flash array with 96x 1.92TB SSD’s for their main, active Data Centre along with a HPE 7400c SAN Array with 36x 6TB 7.2K SAS Hard Drives at their disaster recovery Data Centre B 100miles away.
The 3PAR units were fully configured by our in-house HPE engineers and tested before being shipped in custom packaging to ensure a safe transit. Once the 3PAR arrived, a fully trained Intelligent Servers 3PAR engineer used a remote desktop application to take the IT manager through 3PAR remote setup training session to ensure the IT team fully understood how to deploy and manage the 3PAR.
As they didn’t have the bandwidth between Data Centre’s for 3PAR Peer Persistence which provides uninterruptible live SAN failover for all host Servers connected to the SAN infrastructure, we opted the next best thing which is “3PAR Remote Copy”.
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3PAR Remote Copy
HPE 3PAR Remote Copy is a unique replication technology that can happily replicate SAN data over their 100Mbit site-to-site Data Centre link. Remote Copy dramatically reduces the cost of remote data replication and disaster recovery on several fronts by leveraging HPE 3PAR's unique thin copy technologies.
If the customer had a full site failure at their active Data Centre A, they could power on their cold standby HPE Blade Servers at Data Centre B, switch the HPE 3PAR 7400c SAN Array to the active SAN in the Remote Copy pairing and power on the VMware ESXi 6.7 virtual machines which were being live replicated to the HPE 3PAR 7400c SAN Array in Data Centre B before the disaster occurred in the customers Active Data Centre A.
Once Data Centre A comes back online and the 3PAR 7400c has synced back any changes to the 3PAR 7450c at Data Centre B, the customer can shut down the virtual machines at Data Centre B, switch the active SAN back to the HPE 3PAR 7450c SAN Array in Data Centre A and boot the virtual machines back up again on the production host servers that are in Data Centre A.
Although this setup using the HPE 3PAR Remote Copy feature isn’t seamless, automatic SAN failover, the customer can get their 100+ virtual machines back up and running within an hour, where restoring from backups could easily take them 2-5 days to fully recover.
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Key benefits
3PAR engineers for advice and configuration
Free remote setup training session to ease 3PAR integration and deployment
Significant disaster recovery solution improvements
Leveraging unique 3PAR technologies to reduce costs
Backup recovery time has gone from days to hours
Three year hardware warranty including support
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Intelligent Servers is one of Europe’s leading refurbished Server, Storage, Networking and Component resellers, specialising in HPE, Dell and Cisco. All hardware comes with a three year warranty including remote setup and support. If you’re looking into your next IT infrastructure project, please get in touch with the team on 01423 223430.