EMC RecoverPoint-Hardware Awareness (Bit I)
Here is a quick rundown of what shells the idea of an RPA or RecoverPoint appliance. Under the covers its nothing more than a Dell 1950 (BTW, EOL’d Q2 2008). Corresponding to the 2.4 and the 3.0 release there exists two generations of the RPA’s easily recognizable by the HBA’s in use, Gen1 2Gb HBA’s, Gen3 4Gb HBA’s. Here is the breakdown..
- Gen 1:
- Phase 2 1950
- PCI-X bus architecture
- 2 2Gb Qlogic 2342-Dual ported
- 2 sockets Dual Core, Intel Xeon Woodcrest
- Compatible with RP V2.4 or V3.0 (V2.4 will not work with Gen 3 hardware)
- Gen 3 (No I didn’t skip 2, huh?):
- Phase 3 1950
- PCI-E bus architecture
- 2 4Gb Qlogic 2462-Dual ported
- 2 sockets Quad Core, Intel Xeon Harpertown
- Compatible with RP V3.0 and above only
Note–the shear fact that these are commodity servers implies that with the RP software and a linux 2.6 kernel in hand you could effectively build your own RP appliance for a lab environment, more on this in another post…
The HBA’s on the Gen3 hardware are auto sensing dual mode adaptors, meaning they act as either an initiator or target depending on what they are connected to. This, I imagine, would be a welcome change from the Gen1 HBA’s as only ports 0 and 2 were designated as targets, 1 and 3 as initiators.
In addition, there are two GiGe ports per node. One for management and LAN replication and one for WAN replication traffic. Each RPA needs an ip address as well as one VIP for floating IP management.
The linux kernel and RP software are installed locally on the RPA’s. Each appliance has 2 73G drives configured as a mirror set. Furthermore, the local identity of the RPA is also stored here, name, ip address, etc. All consistency group, replication sets, bit mapping, etc are stored within the repository (SAN based, expansion in future posts).
Something to keep in mind, EMC sells RP in a minimum 2 node configuration, however this doesn’t imply that a single node will not work only that HA is no longer possible. If CRR or CLR is in play, your destination site hardware must mirror your source site hardware. If you have a 2 node cluster at Site A, you must have a 2 node cluster at Site B, this collectively is known as a System.
How about that for a quickie, next post…explanation of the volume type functions within RecoverPoint and perhaps a tad bit more..stay with me.
