EMC have announced at its annual user conference a private cloud appliance that allows synchronous replication between storage arrays up to 100km apart, including the applications and virtual machines associated with them.
The EMC VPLEX appliance supports only block-level data replication across distance, but the company said it is aiming to support file and object-based storage eventually.
EMC said the company's vision is all about the private and public cloud where, like virtualisation in data centres and within storage arrays, a layer of abstraction will be created so that where data resides in a physical location will not be visible to the applications using it.
EMC described this vision as a "federation of resources," where storage capacity and application workloads can dynamically move between data centers.
The VPLEX comes in two versions: the VPLEX Local, a single 2U (3.5-in high) appliance for replication within a single data center between EMC arrays and the VPLEX Metro, which allows two of the boxes synchronous connectivity up to 100km.
EMC said the VPLEX allows administrators to balance workloads over 100km distances and to automatically fail over between data centers to avoid disasters.
According to EMC, a storage administrator who has excess storage capacity at one data center with a VPLEX Metro appliance can link into another data center and utilise that capacity. For example, an EMC Clariion array with additional capacity in one data center can be accessed by another Clariion array in another data center up to 100km away as primary storage for an application server.
EMC said the VPLEX appliance can also leverage management applications on EMC storage arrays. For example, a VPLEX appliance could use EMC's fully automated storage tiering(FAST) technology, which identifies data sets at the volume level to be automatically moved between storage tiers.
The VPLEX Metro has been qualified for use with VMware Vmotion for migration of virtual machines between VMware vSphere clusters for Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle applications. The appliance also supports Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Live Migration, allowing it to migrate those virtual machines, as well.
Each VPLEX appliance comes with one to four controller boards with two quad-core processors. Each controller has 64GB of cache and 32 8Gbit/sec. Fibre Channel ports.
While EMC's VPLEX comes as an appliance, the company said it will eventually embed the application's asynchronous data replication capabilities in all of its storage product lines.
EMC plans two more versions of VPLEX next year: VPLEX Geo, which will allow synchronous data replication between data centers anywhere in the world, and VPLEX Global, which will allow multiple data centers within a broader region to be seen by applications as a single, virtual data center.