Reader Question : Ask the Readers about VPLEX Backups

A reader asked me this question and I unfortunately did not know of any answers so I thought I would post it up and see if anyone could shed some light on it.  If you have any answers or experiences, please share them in the comments.  Thanks!  – Carlo

 

Yesterday I went to the 2012 EMC Forum at the Hilton in New York City, and while sitting in a session regarding active/active datacenters I realized something important. 

How do you properly architect your backup for an active/active datacenter using VPLEX and the Nexus OTV transport? 

Today I have an active/passive architecture and my backups remain local to the servers at the active site.  If I enable an active/active configuration, I wouldn’t want the backup traffic to have to travel across my point to point connection because it could easily saturate the line.  I am curious to hear if there are any backup solutions that exist today that are VPLEX/OTV aware? 

 

In an ideal scenario when the Guest Virtual Machine was moved to another site, the backup software would become aware and run the backup to an appliance/storage local to the VM at the site.  In order for this to work properly, the backup data should be replicated to both sites in case you need to restore at any given time.  As long as the backup data was in sync at both sites, after a guest was migrated, the backup appliance would already have the full backups and should be intelligent enough to know it now only needs to run a differential backup.

 

Does anything exist, or is anyone aware of anything coming soon that will address this?