EVA Business Copy

[Jim Viera]

Is anyone using Business Copy on EVA disk arrays that are able to provide "instantaneous recovery" of an applications Parent LUNs from the associated snapclones??? The Business Copy on the VA7400/7410 arrays allows the ability to take the snapshots and overlay the Parent LUNs. I was surprised to find out that Business Copy on the EVA's do NOT have that functionality. I am using snapshots in an HPUX environment and am looking for the same capability I had when using the VA7400 Business Copy.

I understand that there is a Data Protector Integration Kit that supposedly allow for Instant Recovery in an EVA environment. Is anyone using this??? We have a SYBASE database environment running on 3 nodes in a MC ServiceGuard cluster.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Jim,

The Data Protector EVA Instant Recovery integration isn't supported with Sybase, so you would need to stop Sybase and do filesystem/raw backups for this to work (I guess not an option given that you are in a cluster).

I think your only reaslistic option to obtain this sort of functionality is to script it yourself - use SSSU to create snapclones, and then when recovery is required have the app stopped, the snapclones presented, and the original vdisks destroyed - then use the free'd space to create new snapclones.

Obviously the problem with this is you have to provide a similar level of data resilience and performance for your snapclones as for your original vdisks.

Apparently this sort of functionality will be available in the new EVAs due out later this year - not sure whether they will make it available via VCS and CV EVA upgrades for existing EVAs...

HTH

Duncan

[Uwe Zessin]

I am not sure I understand...

You can assign the same VRAID level like the original disk to the snapclone and you can store the data on fibre channel disk drives, too. That feature is already present in the current generation of EVA.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Uwe,

If I'm understanding Jim correctly he's referring to the capability of doing a 'source volume resync' - i.e. in XP terms this would be automatically copying the contents of a SVOL back to the PVOL

Of course I could have completely mis-understood...

HTH

Duncan

[Jim Viera]

Duncan,

Yes, that's what I was trying to say. It appears that the functionality on the EVA Business Copy falls short of the VA and XP products.

I thought HP was going to take the "BEST" of the VA and EVA line and come up with a superior offering???

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Yes they were - but the current EVA was pretty much out when the merger happened... the new EVA due out fairly soon was developed by the combined team and *will* have this feature.

HTH

Duncan

[Uwe Zessin]

There won't be a 'snap-back' for snapshots, but it will have improvements for snapclones.

[Jim Viera]

It looks like th2 3.0 version of Business Copy has this ability. But we have an EVA3000.