Enabling DR in SmartTier configurations using Veritas Volume Replicator

Veritas™ Volume Replicator (VVR) is a data-replication software solution designed to contribute to an effective disaster recovery plan. VVR enables you to maintain a consistent copy of application data at one or more remote locations.VVR is a separately licensed option of Veritas™ Volume Manager (VxVM) that works as a fully integrated component of VxVM. A key feature that VVR provides is “write-order fidelity” - this ensures data consistency by applying writes on the VVR secondary host in the same order that they were issued by the application on the VVR primary host.

SmartTier is a feature of the Veritas™ File System (VxFS) which enables the effective exploitation of multi-tier storage. The SmartTier user has the ability to create multiple storage tiers and associate the relative importance of data to a specific storage tier. The user is also provided with control on the placement of the data on each of these tiers, based on specific file placement policies as chosen or created by the user. SmartTier works on a Multi-Volume File System (MVFS), which is a file system that resides on two or more storage volumes.

A Volume Set (VSET) is a VxVM object, which internally comprises of a collection of VxVM volumes. The VSET object enables support for MVFS. Starting with SF 4.1 release, VVR supports replicating a VSET as part of a Replicated Data Set (RDS), to a DR site.

SmartTier is built on top of a MVFS, and since VVR supports replicating a VSET, VVR is able to seamlessly integrate with SmartTier.

Note: SmartTier includes and extends functionality previously provided by Dynamic Storage Tiering (DST). Download the attached white paper to learn more.