White Paper

Building a cost effective, continuously

available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX and
EMC VPLEX
A new availability paradigm for the mid-tier

Abstract
Business requirements are placing ever increasing demands on
IT infrastructure to ensure that applications are always operating
at full capability. This white paper looks at how EMC’s class
leading mid-range storage platform, the EMC® VNX® Series, in
conjunction with the class leading EMC VPLEX® storage
federation solution provides a new level of service for mission
critical applications that truly delivers to the paradigm of access
anywhere and protect everywhere.

October 2012
 Copyright © 2012 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as

of its publication date. The information is subject to change
without notice.

The information in this publication is provided “as is.” EMC

Corporation makes no representations or warranties of any kind
with respect to the information in this publication, and
specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or
fitness for a particular purpose.

Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in

this publication requires an applicable software license.

For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC
Corporation Trademarks on EMC.com.

VMware, ESXi, VMware vCenter, and VMware vSphere are

registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the
United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other trademarks
used herein are the property of their respective owners.

Part Number: h11225

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 2

and EMC VPLEX
Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Executive Summary ................................................................................................. 4
Audience ............................................................................................................................ 4
Introduction ............................................................................................................ 5
VNX, class leading mid-tier storage; Product Introduction .................................................. 5
VPLEX, class leading storage federation solution; Product Introduction .............................. 7
VNX and VPLEX, storage synergy ......................................................................................... 8
VPLEX and VNX Use Cases ....................................................................................... 9
Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 9
Continuous Operations....................................................................................................... 9
Never have to migrate again! ........................................................................................ 10
Ride through component, array and site failures! ......................................................... 10
Make planned outages obsolete! ................................................................................. 11
Extending VMware Clusters .............................................................................................. 12
VNX with VPLEX Metro HA and vSphere HA (federated HA) ............................................ 12
VNX with VPLEX Metro and vSphere FT (federated FT) ................................................... 13
Extended Distance VMware Availability solutions ......................................................... 14
True Oracle RAC over Distance .......................................................................................... 15
Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) 11g................................................................... 15
VNX with VPLEX in Extended Oracle RAC solutions ........................................................ 17
Extended Distance Oracle Disaster Recovery Solutions................................................. 17
Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 17
Appendix A: References ......................................................................................... 19

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 3

and EMC VPLEX
Executive Summary
There have been various key strategic initiatives over the years in IT, none more
pervasive than the ubiquitous cloud. It seems that wherever you look, vendors are all
touting their value to businesses looking to embrace the cloud. The cloud is a
distributable approach to delivering IT services in a cost effective manner. The core of
the cloud however, and an underlying requirement in all the “Top CIO concerns”
articles published over the last decade, is the constant challenge to ensure that
service levels are met in an increasingly complex IT world. Fundamentally, this is the
ability to provide an “Always-On” infrastructure that can scale and accommodate
often changing business needs; an IT solution that maintains application availability
regardless of what users, vendors or Mother Nature might throw at it. In most cases,
the highest availability solutions available today replicate their data from an active
site to a passive site such that when a large scale problem happens, they can initiate
a failover to the passive location.
EMC is now able to provide a unique solution, with VNX and VPLEX that delivers an
active/active solution across data centers which in many cases, makes traditional
disaster recovery obsolete. The award winning EMC VNX Series storage platform,
delivers a reliable, easy to use, scalable and efficient storage foundation, to which
VPLEX adds cross data center storage federation. This combination delivers the
continuous operation of business applications through technical refreshes,
infrastructure upgrades, component failures and even large scale disasters. All
included in a cost-effective solution that cannot be matched anywhere in the
industry. Furthermore, the VNX with VPLEX solution can provide:
 Reduced operational costs through a more effective procurement model
 Flexible application protection schemes
 Improved availability through storage self remediation
When the VPLEX with VNX technologies are combined with application availability
technologies such as Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) or VMware® vSphere™
HA features (VMware High Availability / VMware Fault Tolerance / VMware
Distributed Resource Scheduling) it becomes simpler and less expensive to provide
the highest levels of availability to these critical applications. This effectively makes
both planned and unplanned downtime obsolete

Audience
This white paper is intended for CIO’s, systems and storage architects and
administrators who are responsible for architecting, managing and operating high
availability IT environments.

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 4

and EMC VPLEX
Introduction
This paper will outline the business benefits that you will experience by deploying a VNX with
VPLEX solution or adding a VPLEX to your existing VNX deployment. The core, differentiated
values of this solution include:

A more effective procurement model

 Lower cost to entry (don’t need to size array for ‘future’, size for today)
 Enables buying smaller arrays and manage them as one, masking the silos of
complexity
Improved availability (Continuous Operations)
 Move data between arrays non-disruptively
 Non-disruptive hardware and software upgrades
 Tolerate component, processor, entire array and data center failures with zero
downtime
 Never perform a disruptive migration again
 Active / active Datacenters
Improved efficiency and reduced cost
 Tier inside (EMC FAST VP) and outside the array
 Leverage per LUN protection schemes for application protection. A tier 1 app could be
mirrored across two VNX systems, and a tier 2 app may be on a single array
 Re-balance workloads across platforms
Improved service levels
 Alleviate performance bottlenecks
 Stripe workloads across arrays

Now let’s take a high level look at the VNX and the VPLEX technologies.

VNX, class leading mid-tier storage; Product Introduction

The EMC VNX Series storage platform delivers industry-leading innovation and
enterprise capabilities for File, Block and Object Storage in a scalable, easy to use
solution. The VNX combines a powerful and flexible, scale-up, modular hardware
architecture with advanced efficiency, management and protection software to meet
the demanding needs of today’s mid-size and enterprise customers. VNX is designed
from the ground up to deliver 5x9’s of availability through a fault tolerant “No-Single-
point-of-failure design”, high speed controller failover and advanced replication
features for local and remote recovery in the event of disasters.
VNX leverages the concept of self optimizing storage pools, virtualizing storage
management resources in a similar way to how applications and server OS's are
virtualized by VMware, Hyper-V, Xen Server etc. The systems are also expressly
designed to deliver the highest levels of performance by taking advantage of the
latest innovations in Flash technology. As a hybrid array, by combining Flash storage
in a single pool with SAS and NL-SAS Hard Disk Drives (HDD), VNX with its FAST VP

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 5

and EMC VPLEX
and FAST Cache technologies, can dynamically manage data movement at very fine
levels of granularity between these tiers to ensure the data is optimally placed
relative to its required service level. This is known as the FLASH 1st data strategy and
is unique to EMC VNX and delivers unprecedented performance in a mid-range
storage solution, at the lowest possible cost.

Self-Optimizing Storage Pools

Virtual Server Pool

Automatic Application Optimization

Automatic Data Optimization

Storage Pool

Storage
System

Figure 1 VNX Storage Efficiency Technologies

The VNX comes with built in features to help ensure redundant or inactive data does
not consume valuable storage resources. These efficiency technologies, such as thin
provisioning and data compression, ensure that physical hardware resources are
optimized even further and can deliver up to 50% more useable capacity.
VNX is designed to be simple to use, extensible and at the same time powerful and
flexible. Leveraging the Unisphere™ interface, VNX can visualize and manage up to
100 systems in a single, intuitive User Interface (UI). It manages current and legacy
platforms as well as the RecoverPoint replication solution. In addition, VNX integrates
tightly into the VMware and Windows management context and is an ideal mid-tier
solution for virtualized application environments.

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 6

and EMC VPLEX
VPLEX, class leading storage federation solution; Product Introduction
EMC VPLEX is an Enterprise class scale out storage federation technology that
aggregates and manages pools of fiber channel attached storage (EMC and third party
arrays) within and across data centers. VPLEX resides between the server and a
number of heterogeneous storage systems and presents local and distributed
volumes to hosts. VPLEX AccessAnywhere clustering technology allows highly
efficient read/write access to distributed volumes across synchronous distances up
to 5 milliseconds (ms) round trip time (RTT). VPLEX is ideal for a wide range of
companies (both mid-size and Enterprise) and use cases. These use cases include
continuous availability by extending clusters over distance (VMware, Oracle RAC etc.),
application mobility, data migration and technology refresh, and enhancing single
site array availability. For the purposes of this introduction we will take a closer look
at the following use cases:
 Continuous Operations - Customers performing a tech refresh and/or frequent
data migrations, for example when implementing high impact storage
infrastructure changes, are a great use case to start implementing VPLEX.
VPLEX vastly improves asset utilization and workload rebalancing and in
addition VMs, applications, and data can be moved over distance non-
disruptively during migration and when refreshing technology.
 Extending VMware clusters—as discussed above, VPLEX enables immediate
VMware workload mobility for multiple arrays—both locally and remotely.
Customer benefits include automatic, hands-free failover, application
relocation for load balancing or maintenance, elimination of CPU cycles spent
on data movement, higher utilization across all arrays, and simplified, dual-
site, high availability.
 True Oracle RAC over distance —VPLEX provides continuous availability for
mission critical applications like Oracle RAC, enabling Zero RPO and Zero RTO
over synchronous distances—even in the event of a site failure. Benefits
include enhanced application availability, full utilization of dual site
resources, simple management, standard Oracle RAC implementation, and full
certification from Oracle. In addition to support of Oracle RAC, VPLEX can also
interoperate with most third party clustering technologies, such as Linux, Unix
and Windows clusters (including hyperV)
VPLEX can be deployed in one of 3 topologies, VPLEX Local, VPLEX Metro and
VPLEX Geo, although we will specifically focus on VPLEX Local and Metro as Geo is
not supported by Oracle and VMware today. VPLEX Local can be used in a single
data center and allows the federation of multiple storage arrays, and is the basis
for the non-disruptive operations use case. VPLEX Metro extends the VPLEX
benefits to multiple sites at synchronous distances (Up to 5ms RTT) and
introduces the idea of a distributed volume across sites, which adds the fault
tolerant availability use cases for VMware and Oracle RAC that we will investigate
further.

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 7

and EMC VPLEX
 VPLEX Local VPLEX Metro

Within a data Federated

center AccessAnywhere
at synchronous
distances
Figure 2 VPLEX Configuration Options

VNX and VPLEX, storage synergy

EMC’s VNX platform is the storage leader in the cost-effective mid-range market. It is
deployed across almost all mainstream IT applications in organizations of all sizes. It
delivers 5x9’s availability and has high end enterprise functionality for optimal
efficiency and TCO. In certain customer environments however, additional levels of
availability may be required and are available by introducing VPLEX. For example;
 Where many applications are consolidated together in a single fault domain
such as large VMware deployments OR
 Where applications are so critical that any downtime is unacceptable to the
business.
. The most significant value of the VNX to the VPLEX solution is that it enables EMC to
offer a highly cost optimized federated active/active data access solution over
distance with an entry price comparable to that of a replicated (active / passive) Tier
1.5 standalone solution. The most significant value of VPLEX to the VNX solution is
that it offers significant availability benefits over distance and usability benefits, yet
allows customers to continue to leverage the efficiency, protection and management
features that they love so much in the VNX. In addition to this, the VPLEX also
provides a Federated active/active storage access model, compared to the
active/active Asynchronous Logical Unit Access (ALUA) mode of standard VNX. This
further improves availability and ensures ease of use for host pathing configurations.
The combination also allows the aggregation of multiple VNX systems to provide a
solution that delivers huge amounts of aggregate performance for the most
demanding applications.
Although this type of solution can be used for most HA host cluster technologies, the
remainder of this paper will focus on how VPLEX with VNX addresses the following
use cases:

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 8

and EMC VPLEX
  Continuous operations
 Extending VMware clusters
 True Oracle RAC over distance

VPLEX and VNX Use Cases

Introduction
The uniqueness of VPLEX is that it offers a single view of a storage volume (LUN) at 2
different locations that can be up to 5ms RTT apart, and can be dynamically accessed
at either location, while maintaining integrity and consistency of the data set. The
continuous operations use case does not require specialized host software since it
masks the underlying modularity of the attached arrays while enabling dynamic data
migrations between them. This negates the impact of activities that historically would
have required application downtime such as technical refresh on storage devices,
highly impactful software upgrades and the likes.
For our second (VMware) and third use cases (Oracle), the “clustering” technologies
provided by VMware HA / VMware FT and Oracle RAC respectively, work seamlessly
with VPLEX distributed active/active volumes to deliver a “federated” cluster over
distance.
While not expressly covered in this paper, VPLEX can interoperate with any supported
third party clustering technology such as Linux, Unix or Windows clusters either
locally or over geographical distances, so it’s value is not strictly limited to Oracle or
VMware specific clustering / HA capabilities.

Continuous Operations
Continuous operations is a term used to describe some of the core technical VPLEX
with VNX value propositions that enable enterprise IT to offer improved service levels
to the business. One or more of these value propositions may be sufficient to justify
giving VPLEX with VNX serious considerations in your environment. All the benefits
indicated in this section also apply to the VMware and Oracle use cases.

The following benefits that arise from the continuous operations use case, include:
 Never have to migrate again – VPLEX can be simply inserted into most
environments (and supports >40 heterogeneous platforms), with minimal
downtime. Once installed, futures storage assets are seamlessly connected to
VPLEX and LUNs are migrated non disruptively from older assets and then
easily retired.

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 9

and EMC VPLEX
  Ride through component and even whole array failures (requires mirrored copy
of LUNs) – maintain availability through almost all unplanned outages
including site failure.
 Maintain availability through major environmental, hardware and software
planned events – maintain availability throughout all planned events due to
transparent data migration

Never have to migrate again!

Customers typically have to move data for several reasons, but one of the most
onerous tasks for customers, particularly in large capacity environments, is the issue
of managing a storage platform refresh. Conventional approaches use solutions like
tape backups, copying data through hosts or the network, or replicating to another
site. This approach is often slow (some customers are constantly in the processing of
migrating data to new platforms for tech refresh, much like how the golden gate
bridge is permanently being painted!), highly people intensive (therefore costly), error
prone and requires much planning. Perhaps even more impactful however, is that an
outage is usually required, affecting application service levels to the business and
requiring coordination with multiple departments across IT and the core business.
But with VPLEX and VNX, you can now solve these problems once and for all.
Using VPLEX for platform refresh use cases has several advantages over traditional
solutions. The VPLEX Local cluster can be inserted into an existing storage
infrastructure with a minimal amount of impact so less down time is required than
manual array migrations. VPLEX supports over 40 different array types, ensuring that
most environments will be able to leverage the VPLEX benefits immediately and the
introduction or refresh of the VNX storage arrays are seamless. The original host LUNs
are simply made available to the host in a pass through mode, although termination
for the LUN takes places in VPLEX. Once you are operating in this mode, new storage
systems can be added behind the VPLEX and migration jobs can be initiated. This
process is seamless to the applications which continue to operate as if nothing
happened. Systems can be cost effectively scaled by starting small and adding
multiple arrays as demands require.
But what if the migration is part of a consolidation into a new data center? VPLEX
Metro introduces the concept of the cooperation of two VPLEX clusters, each serving
their own failure domain over synchronous distance. This is known as "Federation"
and enables seamless migration between sites but also introduces the opportunity to
form active/active distributed volume(s) which can be used for the other use cases in
this paper.

Ride through component, array and site failures!

High availability and fault tolerance are terms that several companies will claim they
can deliver, but VNX with VPLEX delivers fault tolerance at distance, changing the
game and creating a new category of high availability. High availability starts with the
reliability of the individual components of a solution and while individual
components are usually very reliable, as those systems scale, a failure can have a

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 10

and EMC VPLEX
large scale impact. VPLEX adds value to individual storage arrays by offering the
option to mirror data to different VNX arrays within or between different data centers.
This functionality allows system failures to have no impact to the business
applications, whether a component of an array, an array itself or a whole data center
(with VPLEX Witness deployed) is affected
Providing continuous system level uptime for critical applications through
unexpected (disaster) events has historically required a storage level replication
solution, with a manual failover and restart process. These conventional solutions
force companies to choose a recovery point objective or RPO – the amount of data
that the business can tolerate to lose following a disaster event - and Recovery Time
Objective or RTO – the amount of time it takes me to recover the application following
a disaster event. But although some solutions offer small RTOs and RPOs, typically
the lower the RPO/RTO the more expensive is the solution and in addition there is still
some degree of down time required to recover — and for most companies, any
downtime at all can be costly.
VPLEX with VNX is a truly differentiated and unique solution for high availability, for
all or part of your environment. No manual intervention is required, and no storage
level recovery or restart is necessary, removing the quandary that faces customers
when deciding whether to implement the failover process or not. Within synchronous
distances using this solution, VPLEX and VNX provide HA and disaster/downtime
avoidance instead of just disaster recovery—because there is literally no disaster
event from which to recover. In effect, VPLEX with VNX can be configured to change
the way we think about disasters and instead of a replication and manual restart
approach to Disaster Recovery, provides a disaster tolerant solution, where the loss
of a data center is much like the loss of a redundant storage component in
conventional storage architectures.

Make planned outages obsolete!

While companies spend millions of dollars on solutions intended to provide a
mechanism to resume services following an unplanned disastrous event, it is in fact
much more common that system availability is affected by foreseeable outages such
as hardware upgrades, software or firmware upgrades or infrastructural events like
power and cooling upgrades. In many conventional storage solutions, such events are
timed to happen at periods of little system activity. Large, modern data centers
however, cannot tolerate any down time at all. For these environments, the VPLEX
technology can simply migrate workloads from one VNX system that requires
maintenance to another VNX system in the VPLEX cluster, such that applications are
unaffected by such upgrades. In the event that infrastructure upgrades are required
that potentially impact a whole data center, a multi-site VPLEX with VNX
implementation is able to seamlessly shift its operations to the second data center
while the primary data center is offline and seamlessly re-activate the primary site
when services are returned.

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 11

and EMC VPLEX
Extending VMware Clusters
Due to its core design, EMC VPLEX Metro with EMC VNX, provides the perfect
foundation for VMware Fault Tolerance and High Availability clustering over distance.
This solution ensures a simple and transparent deployment of stretched clusters
without any added complexity. The integration of the VPLEX and VNX with VMware
solution is fully certified and supported by VMware.

VMware vMotion
VMware HA
VMware DRS
VMware FT

VPLEX Metro

Active Failure Domain Active Failure Domain

Figure 3 VNX with VPLEX Metro HA and vSphere HA solutions

VNX with VPLEX Metro HA and vSphere HA (federated HA)

VPLEX Metro takes a single “Host” block storage device in one location and
“distributes” it to provide single disk semantics across two locations. This enables a
“distributed” VMFS datastore to be created on that virtual volume. Using some of the
cache management algorithms that EMC has built into our enterprise storage arrays
over many years (such as large cache management and data read-ahead), VPLEX
introduces a unique technology that’s built around distributed cache coherency. It
doesn’t operate using cache mirroring or trying to keep cache consistent in every
engine in every state, but instead operates with a very lightweight protocol that tracks
who owns what data and where. That data can move, and it can exist in multiple
places. This capability is the main driver that allows EMC to extend this cluster

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 12

and EMC VPLEX
implementation out over distance and deliver storage virtualization where it’s never
been able to be delivered before.
On top of this, if the layer 2 network has also been “stretched” then a single instance
of vSphere (a single logical virtualized datacenter) can now also be “distributed” into
more than one location and HA enabled for any given vSphere cluster! This is possible
since the storage federation layer of the VPLEX is completely transparent to ESXi™. It
therefore enables the user to add ESXi hosts at two different locations to the same HA
cluster.
Stretching a HA failover cluster (such as VMware HA) with VPLEX creates a “Federated
HA” cluster over distance. This blurs the boundaries between local HA and disaster
recovery since the configuration has the automatic restart capabilities of HA
combined with the geographical distance typically associated with synchronous DR.
A federated HA solution is an ideal fit if a customer has two datacenters that are no
more than 5ms RTT apart, (about a 300 mile theoretical maximum in perfect
laboratory conditions) and wants to enable an active/active datacenter design whilst
also significantly enhancing availability.
Using this type of solution brings several key business continuity items into the
solution including downtime and disaster avoidance as well as fully-automatic
service restart in the event of a total site outage.
Benefit 1. Datacenter pooling using DRS with federated HA - By enabling VMware
DRS (Dynamic Resource Scheduler) within the stretched cluster, the VMware
vCenter™/ESXi server load can be distributed over two separate locations driving up
utilization and using all available, formerly passive, assets. Effectively two physical
datacenters act as a single logical datacenter.
Benefit 2. Avoiding downtime and disasters using federated HA and vMotion - Using
the vMotion ability of vCenter, active VMs (or group of VMs) can be moved to any ESXi
server in another (physical) datacenter. Since the vMotion ability is now federated
over distance, planned downtime can be avoided for events that affect an entire
datacenter location. For instance, a hurricane may be in close proximity to your
datacenter, this solution provides the ability to move the VMs elsewhere avoiding any
potential disaster.
With vSphere HA, the VMware recovery process at the second site results in the
affected vm(s) being rebooted and application re-started. While this is an automatic
process that typically takes in the order of a minute or so, it does result in an impact
to the application availability. For even greater levels of availability, VMware offers
vSphere FT.

VNX with VPLEX Metro and vSphere FT (federated FT)

Deploying VMware FT on top of a VPLEX Metro HA configuration goes another step
beyond traditional availability (even when compared to federated HA) by enabling a
"continuous availability" solution. This means that for any failure, there is no
downtime whatsoever (zero RPO and zero RTO), as the primary vm has a shadow vm
in full lockstep at the secondary location.

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 13

and EMC VPLEX
This type of solution is an ideal fit if a customer has two datacenters that are no more
than 1ms (round trip latency) apart (typically associated with campus type distances).
If they want to protect the most critical parts of the business at the highest tier
enabling continuous availability then an active/active datacenter design can be
enabled whereby one datacenter is effectively kept in full lock step with the other,
delivering a new concept: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Datacenters (RAID). (To
see both vSphere HA and FT in action, please see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk-
1wp91i2Y )

Extended Distance VMware Availability solutions

These availability solutions are clearly intended to be used within campus distances,
so what if there is a requirement to maintain a disaster recovery site beyond the
distance limitations supported by VMware for VM HA or VM FT? VMware vCenter Site
Recovery Manager (SRM), used in conjunction with storage level remote replication, is
the preferred and recommended solution for conventional VM disaster recovery and is
fully compatible with VPLEX (Local or Metro) through the EMC RecoverPoint
Continuous Remote Replication (CRR) capability which integrates fully with VMware
SRM, even while also providing a fully federated metro solution.

VMware vMotion
VMware HA
VMware DRS
VMware FT VMware SRM

VPLEX Metro

EMC
RecoverPoint

Automatic Automated
Failover Failover

Active Failure Domain Active Failure Domain Passive Failure Domain

Figure 4 VNX and VPLEX Metro HA with vSphere and 3rd site for remote DR Solution
Since a VM can now be protected using different geographical protection options, a
choice can now be made as to how each VM can be configured to ensure that the
protection schema matches that of the business criticality. This can effectively be
thought of as protection tiering.
The figure below shows the various protections tiers and how they each relate to
business criticality.

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 14

and EMC VPLEX
 (+) Criticality (-)
Federated FT* FT. +
VPLEX

AUTOMATIC
Federated HA* HA +
VPLEX
.

Disaster Recovery SRM+VPLEX+RecoverPoint

.

Figure 5 Protection tiering vs. business criticality

For more information regarding VMware and VPLEX, including product details, best
practices as well as failure scenarios and outcomes, please
see:http://powerlink.emc.com/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Technical/White_Paper/h1
1065-VPLEX-with-VMware-FT-HA.pdf

True Oracle RAC over Distance

More than any other application, Enterprises entrust their businesses to Oracle.
Whether it is used to support transactional systems, ERP, CRM or business analytics,
business processes are so tightly integrated to the ongoing running of a company that
it is simply unthinkable for these applications to be unavailable. The EMC VPLEX and
VNX solution provides storage infrastructure for Oracle that delivers the following core
benefits:
 Fully automatic failure handling
 Increased utilization of hardware and software assets
o Active/active use of both data centers
o Automatic load balancing between data centers
o Zero downtime maintenance.
 Simplified deployment of Oracle RAC on extended distance clusters
 Reduced costs by increasing automation and infrastructure utilization.

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) 11g

Oracle RAC is a continuous-availability solution for Oracle database applications
within the data center. It enables multiple Oracle instances on independent servers to
share a copy of a database to improve availability, scalability, fault tolerance and
load balancing. Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is an integrated file

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 15

and EMC VPLEX
system for the Oracle Database and along with Oracle Clusterware software, provides
the cluster and storage management services required to run Oracle RAC. Oracle also
supports RAC on extended distance clusters, whereby servers in the cluster can
reside in physically separate locations. This, when combined with a federated storage
solution such as VPLEX with VNX, provides the above bulleted benefits and is unique
to EMC.

ACTIVE ACTIVE

VPLEX Metro
ACTIVE
Storage

Active Failure Domain Active Failure Domain

Figure 6 Contemporary Active/Active Oracle Extended RAC Solution

The recommended maximum separation for Oracle databases in the above
configuration is up to 5 ms RTT (this is a recommendation from both EMC and Oracle).
With conventional storage technologies, the resources in site B would be passive,
waiting to be activated following a manual failover process. This process is
sometimes so onerous, that for the most common types of disaster, human error or
power outage, it is quicker to fix the problem at the local site than perform the
failover. When adding VPLEX with VNX however, both sites are actively processing
work and in the event of a temporary loss of one of the sites or its core components,
the combination of the RAC clustering software, via the Oracle Transparent
Application Failover feature, and the single distributed volume provided by VPLEX
allows sessions to automatically failover to the surviving RAC nodes, simply riding
through the issue with no downtime. This makes the solution not only incredibly
available but extremely easy to manage as well.

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 16

and EMC VPLEX
VNX with VPLEX in Extended Oracle RAC solutions
As with the VMware solution discussed earlier, the VNX is an ideal and cost effective solution
for Oracle workloads. VNX implements the FLASH 1st data management strategy via the FAST VP
and FAST Cache technologies. Typical transactional workloads are ideally suited to the VNX due
to the inherent skew (small capacities in a database are responsible for the majority of the IO’s
to the database) in the data set. This means that without any Oracle tuning, FAST VP ensures
the system will dynamically move data that requires the highest levels of performance to Flash
drives and the data that is no longer accessed will be moved to high capacity NL-SAS drives
totally seamlessly to the Oracle application.

VNX FAST Cache ensures that should a previously “cold” piece of data become spontaneously
highly active, it will be dynamically loaded into Flash SSDs within a matter of milliseconds. In
internal testing, we have seen up to 4x the performance of a system using FAST VP and FAST
Cache than one without these technologies (Ref – Nashville Electric Services Customer Success
Story). With VPLEX ensuring always-on availability and VNX optimizing the performance and
TCO of the system, there is nothing else in the market today that can compete with this
combination of class leading storage solutions.

Extended Distance Oracle Disaster Recovery Solutions.

With EMC’s recommendation that Oracle extended RAC solutions incur no more than
a 5 ms round trip delay between sites, it is often required to provide a long distance
“traditional” replicated DR solution. VPLEX (Local or Metro), along with EMC
RecoverPoint Continuous Remote Replication (CRR) capability integrate to provide a
long distance protection methodology to a third site for full DR protection. The value
of the CRR solution for the Oracle use case is comparable to the extended distance DR
solution discussed in the VMware section

Conclusion
Since its release, the EMC VNX platform has garnered many accolades and has
proved to be a popular platform in the mid-range market. Offering class leading
performance, optimal total cost of ownership thanks to the FLASH 1st strategy and
with unmatched ease-of-use, it has been implemented across virtually all industries
and applications. Enhancing these capabilities with the EMC VPLEX storage
Federation solution, it is really a case of 1+1=3. Extending the traditional mid-range
storage plays such that zero down time of your mission critical applications is truly
within your grasp. VNX and VPLEX offer the following uniquely differentiated benefits:

 Delivering true continuous availability for your most mission critical

applications

 Removing the need to perform data migrations

 Extended the useful life of your storage assets

 More effectively leveraging all the storage system resources

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 17

and EMC VPLEX
For more details on VNX and VPLEX please visit emc.com and consult the references
below.

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 18

and EMC VPLEX
Appendix A: References

EMC VPLEX page on EMC.com (videos, white papers, solutions overviews, customer
success stories)
http://www.emc.com/campaign/global/vplex/index.htm

EMC VNX page on EMC.com (videos, white papers, solutions overviews, customer
success stories)
http://www.emc.com/storage/vnx/vnx-series.htm

VPLEX Data Sheet

http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/data-sheet/h7070-vplex-family-ds.pdf

VNX Family Data Sheet

http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/data-sheets/h8520-vnx-family-ds.pdf

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on Extended Distance Clusters with EMC VPLEX
Metro - Best Practices Planning
http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h8930-vplex-metro-oracle-
rac-wp.pdf

Workload Resiliency with EMC VPLEX – Best Practices Planning

http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h7138-workload-resiliency-
vplex-wp.pdf

Using VMware Virtualization Platforms with EMC VPLEX – Best Practices Planning
http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h7118-using-vmware-
virtualization-platforms-vplex.pdf

EMC VPLEX HA Techbook

http:/www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/technical-documentation/h7113-vplex-architecture-
deployment.pdf

VMware Metro Storage Cluster White paper

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 19

and EMC VPLEX
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vSPHR-CS-MTRO-STOR-CLSTR-USLET-102-HI-
RES.pdf

VPLEX implementation best practices

http://powerlink.emc.com/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Technical/Technical_Documentation/h7
139-implementation-planning-vplex-tn.pdf

EMC RecoverPoint page on EMC.com

http://www.emc.com/replication/recoverpoint/recoverpoint.htm

EMC VPLEX with VMware FT and VMware HA on PowerLink

http://powerlink.emc.com/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Technical/White_Paper/h11065-VPLEX-
with-VMware-FT-HA.pdf

Dissolving Distance: EMC VPLEX for VMware Overview - Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp9QDGbcCAk&feature=youtu.be

Dissolving Distance: EMC VPLEX for VMware - Video/Demonstration:

http://www.emc.com/collateral/demos/microsites/mediaplayer-video/dissolving-distance-
emc-vplex-vmware.htm

VPLEX for Oracle RAC on Everything Oracle on EMC Customer Network:

https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-18797

Building a cost effective, continuously available storage infrastructure; EMC VNX 20

and EMC VPLEX