Get disaster tolerant file services across sites with HPE 3PAR StoreServ arrays

[StorageExperts]

HPE 3PAR StoreServ works to protect your data. Now new HPE 3PAR OS 3.3.1 MU2 Patch 36 enhances the current user experience by enabling every aspect of the failover process to be automatic.

Continuous access to information is critical for any modern business. If data becomes inaccessible, your business operations can be heavily impacted. This risks loss of revenue and can sometimes even cause businesses to collapse. Because of this, IT is challenged with building disaster tolerant solutions—beyond just avoiding single points of failures.

Organizations often chose to build multi-site data center infrastructures with automated failover of IT services to minimize and avoid downtime caused by disasters. HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage—with its Remote Copy and Peer Persistence technologies—plays an essential role in these infrastructures, enabling zero downtime for myriad applications.

Why 3PAR for disaster tolerance 

Current 3PAR solutions for disaster tolerance include file services, enabled by the File Persona feature, but require a considerable amount of administrator intervention. In a disastrous event, File Provisioning Group (FPG) volumes become available on the secondary array, but are not activated automatically, which leads to downtime for File Persona file shares.

In HPE 3PAR OS 3.3.1 MU2 Patch 36, we have enhanced the current user experience by enabling every aspect of the failover process to be automatic. FPGs are automatically recovered as part of the failover and clients don’t have to remount the shares after failover completion. An independent quorum witness that is also used to enable Peer Persistence for block volumes acts as an arbitrator to support the automatic failover.

Failback after recovery is simply done by a straightforward use of a button in the HPE 3PAR StoreServ Management Console.

With these enhancements, 3PAR now enables multi-site, disaster tolerant solutions across all its data access protocols, including block and file protocols. And IT is no longer burdened to manage dedicated infrastructures for file or block workloads. You can instead rely on 3PAR as a unified, disaster tolerant solution for all workloads and data types.

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 Meet Around the Storage Block blogger Vivek Pamadi, Senior Product Manager, HPE Storage.