Peer Protection
Built-in Foundation of Data Availability and Security
A rich suite of peer protection features is built into every Dell EqualLogic PS Series array to protect your system and your data for continuous operations. Complete system monitoring gives administrators a comprehensive view of the health and status not only of their SANs, but also of individual components such as disk drives, power supplies, and controllers. The PS Series unique Auto-Stat Disk Monitoring System proactively scans disk drives in the background to detect and correct problems before any impact; in addition, automatic sparing ensures business continuity. Standard group event notification methods such as E-mail, syslog, and SNMP are included, as is E-mail Home functionality for automatic customer support contact.
Other peer protection features include multi-path I/O (MPIO), snapshots, and auto replication. MPIO eliminates any single point of failure in connections between servers and storage and provides high availability and performance load balancing across multiple network ports.
Space efficient snapshots are quickly and easily created and can be used for fast recovery and offloading backup; snapshots can be created manually or automatically according to a user-defined schedule. Multiple point-in-time copies provide multiple instantaneous restore points.
Auto replication to remote locations across a standard IP network provides multiple recovery points for data protection and disaster recovery. Bi-directional replication is easy to set up and manage, and can be performed across any distance. With the PS Series, getting your disaster recovery site operational is simple, even if the primary site is already loaded with terabytes of data. EqualLogic SANs provides the capability to perform an initial manual sync by copying the primary site data to transportable media, physically shipping the media to the remote site, unloading the data, and then starting up automatic replication. Automatic failover and failback functions enable non-disruptive testing of your disaster recovery environment in addition to facilitating continuous access to your data stored on a Dell EqualLogic SAN.