Storage administrators today are caught in a dangerous balancing act protecting mission critical data — they are trying to meet aggressive recovery point and recovery time objectives while under increasing pressure to reduce costs. APTARE StorageConsole Replication Manager can help them measure compliance, maximize resources, control costs, and improve the overall performance of their business continuity environments.

MEASURE COMPLIANCE

One of the critical elements of managing storage within the data center is to ensure that the policies and service level agreements for replication of mission-critical data are being met. Failure to adhere to business continuity plans can put the whole company at risk. With APTAR® StorageConsole® Replication Manager, storage administrators can proactively view and monitor their storage replication environments by actually measuring if they are in compliance with their stated business continuity objectives.

• Compare replication policies to actual replication events to monitor recovery point objectives.
• Examine the stability of mirrored data on replication volumes to make sure it is adequately protected and not subject to data corruption.
• Ensure recoverability status of split mirror volumes before rollback operations.
• Determine replication consistency for applications and databases that span multiple volumes.
• Generate automatic notification in the event that mission-critical data replication falls outside its recovery point objective.

MAXIMIZE RESOURCE UTILIZATION

A major benefit of replication software is the ability to generate multiple point-in-time snapshot copies and to provide protection by mirroring these snapshots to remote storage. This protection guarantees that the data can be recovered from the latest version. However, this also introduces the problem of wasted storage capacity that is being occupied by obsolete copies — both on the source storage system and on the destination storage system. APTARE StorageConsole Replication Manager allows storage administration to see what storage capacity is really necessary for snapshot and mirrored volumes and which storage capacity is being wasted.

• Examine the versions of both local point-in-time snapshots, as well as, remote mirrored or vaulted copies of these snapshots.
• Determine quickly if snapshots or mirrors are out-of-date and if physical storage capacity can be reclaimed.
• Plan for growth of primary storage capacity and secondary disaster recovery storage capacity as replication demands increase.
• Issue warnings when replication storage capacity becomes dangerously low.

CONTROL COSTS

The costs to provide protection for mission-critical data using replication technology can quickly escalate out of control. As more data is identified as being "mission-critical," pressure is applied on both storage and networking resources. Also, it is becoming increasingly difficult to allocate the true cost of protecting this data, back to the appropriate business unit. With APTARE StorageConsole Replication Manager, storage administrators can get a better understanding of how to manage costs of their data replication environments.

• Obtain usage statistics for each individual replication volume at both the source and destination storage systems.
• Examine the impact of moving destination replication volumes to lower-cost storage systems (tiered storage) or of changing the retention period of these volumes.
• Produce chargeback reports based on replication consumption levels, along with associated costs based on user-defined pricing.

IMPROVE PERFORMANCE

One of the main concerns in implementing replication policies is the performance impact these policies have on the underlying storage infrastructure. Although most modern storage replication software solutions use copy on write technology to minimize overhead, remote mirroring and cloning operations can have an adverse performance impact. APTARE StorageConsole Replication Manager can provide storage administrators with knowledge on how to improve the performance of their replication policies.

• Examine replication policy schedules and determine immediately the frequency and duration of replication events from the source to the destination.
• See how best to balance storage resources to arrive at a flexible data replication solution using tiered storage.
• Understand the details behind remote mirroring operations by knowing their exact duration and throughput metrics and see the trends of these operations over time.