Data Protection Strategies for VxRail in a Multi-Cloud World

As customers are facing explosive data growth in their data centers – 163 ZB of data by 2025 – it has become imperative for businesses to protect and manage that data as well. However, data protection in the traditional data center can be inefficient, expensive, complex, and require multiple vendors. Dell EMC’s data protection solutions can simplify these complexities through integration, scalability, and automation to empower data owners with the necessary tools to meet the needs of fast-growing organizations of any size.

Colin Durocher, Product Manager from Dell EMC, and KJ Bedard, VxRail Technical Marketing Manager from Dell EMC, recently spoke about VxRail leading the HCI market by combining best-of-breed technologies to simplify the path towards the VMware cloud.

Powered by VMware vSAN, VxRail transforms IT faster. VxRail consolidates compute, storage and virtualization with end-to-end lifecycle management. VxRail customers see a 52% reduction in time spent on infrastructure deployment tasks. VxRail includes a full suite of software including data protection and recovery provided by snapshots and stretched cluster technology, ensuring data efficiency services that are ready for any virtualized workload. VxRail’s resilient architecture protects the integrity of virtual machines (VMs) as well as the individual profiles for each VM.

With VxRail, Dell EMC can meet any RPO/RTO service level objective and covers the widest ecosystem of applications and environments. Specifically, the VxRail data protection deployment schema has six data protection solutions in private and hybrid cloud disaster recovery (DR).

The three private cloud data protection solutions satisfy Tier-0, Tier-1 and local data protection.

1. VxRail Active – active stretch clustering for Tier-0 data protection. This solution provides continuous availability with local clusters for site level protection with zero data loss and near instantaneous recovery, as well as automated failover in case of site failures. Stretched clusters can also support a minimum of 3 nodes per site (local and remote) and a maximum of 15 nodes per site; 15 on local and 15 on remote. Benefits include using stretched clustering for disaster avoidance, planned maintenance activities and zero RPO. Upgrades are not customer driven and require contacting support. With site failure, vSAN maintains availability with local redundancy in surviving site, while requiring no change in stretched cluster configuration steps.

2. Tier-1 DR between sites, powered by RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines (RP4VMs) –  Architecturally, RP4VMs provide no single point of failure, sync, async, or dynamic replication. This enables data recovery to any point-in-time (PiT), locally or remotely. RP4VMs can be used in a multitude of use cases such as operational recovery in case of data damage, migration and data protection, automated disaster recovery, and data reuse.

3. Local data protection – Modern data centers need next generation data management software. Customers can extend Dell EMC on-premises with the Dell EMC PowerProtect X400 appliance and software, powered by Data Domain’s deduplication technology.

The Dell EMC PowerProtect X400 particularly makes sense for the VxRail because it has the same hardware, making it a fit for HCI. The hardware is optimized for data protection instead of having a separate VxRail cluster for data protection, and it can scale-out like a VxRail.

PowerProtect software is also available for VMware Cloud™ on AWS and enables integration with on-premises data protection that simplifies administration, offers best-in-class deduplication and seamless integration, and simplifies management with automated operations.

The three hybrid cloud DR solutions satisfy Tier-2 and beyond:

1. Tier-2 DR or VMware site recovery for VMware Cloud™ on AWS combines the power of Site Recovery Manager with vSphere replication and the elasticity and simplicity of the cloud. This solution provides a 1-click DR automation for low RTOs, as well as a hypervisor based VM replication, which copies snapshots to the remote site. VMware site recovery for VMware Cloud™ on AWS is equipped with ready-to-go infrastructure in the cloud and offers DR as a Service (DRaaS).

2. RP4VMs replicate the data to AWS S3 storage, offering customers a low-cost DR site. Cloud DR recovers to VMware Cloud™ on AWS on-demand, provides consistency and a familiar UI for vAdmins. Additionally, RP4VMs can be combined with local and remote snapshots for any-PiT protection.

3. Tier-3 DR or PowerProtect Cloud DR provides orchestrated DR, which enables test and failover to VMware Cloud™ on AWS, vMotion back to an on-premises location, and multiple VMs DR plans. PowerProtect Cloud DR also has a minimal cloud cost and footprint, protecting data directly to AWS S3 storage and eliminating DR data center costs. This ensures that your virtualized environment is simple to operate by utilizing the existing on-premises UI, direct in-cloud access, and fully automated failover. Cloud DR Standard mode supports the option to recover directly from the VMs copies stored in S3 directly to VMware Cloud™ on AWS.

These data protection approaches provide customers with the performance and simplicity that they need to address the operational and compliance requirements for the modern SDDC. Business needs combined with financial constraints drive the right solution for any given application. Customers with variety of applications may elect to have a variety of solutions, but PowerProtect covers most of the space. With VxRail and VMware, Dell EMC offers the full spectrum of data protection solutions for any environment. This is just another example of how Dell EMC and VMware are better together.