Storage Management Strategies for the CIOI have to design a disaster recovery solution. I will have two sites, primary and DR. At each site, I will have an HP SAN (either MSA1000 or EVA3000). My basic concern is with replication between the two SANs, primary and DR. The operating environments are Windows/Linux and AIX. At the primary site, there will be 28 servers connected to SAN, while at the DR Site there will be four servers. All servers are IA32-based (mostly IBM XSeries and HP ProLiant two-way/four-way).
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At the time of writing, HP did not seem to provide a hardware-based replication solution between its EVA and MSA disk arrays. The only data replication option with the MSA1000 is a host-based replication over IP, but the choice of platform is limited to Windows-based operating systems. However, a large and growing number of third party vendors offer host-based data replication solutions over IP with support for both AIX and Linux.
That said, it would be advisable to contact HP and review all your options with them since support changes rapidly. It would also appear that, at the time of writing, HP offered no support for AIX connectivity to the MSA1000. This should be confirmed with the vendor, as it can be a very important factor in the design of a DR solution where full vendor support is essential.
This was first published in March 2005