Hybrid and multicloud deployment are the new standard for enterprise infrastructure. In these deployments, data mobility is key. For NetApp users, SnapMirror® can be used to replicate data from on-prem to the cloud, across availability zones within a public cloud region, between different public clouds, or globally between multicloud storage environments.
Multicloud deployment can also be a DR solution, allowing you to immediately bring up your software stack in another public cloud, as a copy of your data already resides there. Or this can be done using specialized services available only from one public cloud without migrating applications to that cloud.
This blog will describe NetApp's SnapMirror data replication technology, explain the concept of multicloud deployment, provide an architectural overview, and discuss example use cases.
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There are a number of use cases where companies might want to deploy a secondary copy in a different cloud environment, including:
Cloud providers generally offer similar services that serve the same use cases, but the different management systems use separate terms and provisioning processes with varying cost models.
As an example, data protection policies and offerings vary across cloud storage vendors and may not match what you use in your data center which can lead to backup policies in different environments.
No cloud storage providers offer native tools or methods for synchronizing data across different clouds, so administrators often rely on third-party tools. Unfortunately, these present additional complexities and cost, with another management console to learn.
Security services and encryption are vendor-specific, and storage administrators need to understand each vendor and how they differ for this critical part of storage management.
Automation tools are bespoke to the cloud provider. Both vendor and 3rd party solutions rely on the provider's API. The result is a more expansive DevOps code base and more complexity.
You can find further explanation of these difficulties in this post on the challenges of multicloud deployment.
SnapMirror is a mature and proven feature for ONTAP that creates a replica of a source volume on a destination ONTAP system. This technology has been used for years on-prem to copy data between ONTAP systems. Any two ONTAP systems which can communicate across a network or internetwork can form a SnapMirror relationship. This functionality has greatly advanced with cloud-based deployment.
Today, SnapMirror functionality has extended to the cloud, allowing users to back up and move data to and from Cloud Volumes ONTAP, between hybrid architectures using ONTAP and Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and between Cloud Volumes ONTAP systems either within a single vendor's cloud or across multiple clouds. SnapMirror functionality with Cloud Volumes ONTAP is orchestrated by NetApp Cloud Manager.
During the initiation of a SnapMirror relationship, an entire block-level copy of the source volume is created on the destination ONTAP system, including any volume snapshots existing on the source volume. The destination volume is read-only but kept synchronized with the source volume, either synchronously or asynchronously.
For an asynchronous SnapMirror, at a defined interval, NetApp Snapshot™ technology is used to copy all the data blocks in the source volume to the destination volume which have changed in that interval. At this point, the destination volume and the source volume are identical.
With synchronous SnapMirror, the source ONTAP system immediately sends all changed blocks to the destination. Synchronicity is limited only by the network's throughput and performance of the destination storage.
Blocks from the source volume containing space-efficient compressed or deduplicated data are transferred to the destination just as they are. This preservation of storage efficiencies keeps the data footprint optimized, lowers transfer costs, and saves computing resources on the destination system, which otherwise would have to recompress and deduplicate the data again.
Once a SnapMirror initialization completes, a user could at any point choose to break the SnapMirror relationship. Then, the destination volume would become a normal writable volume, valuable in moving data between locations in a controlled manner.
A NetApp customer, a global leader in materials engineering solutions for the semiconductors industry, was initially using ONTAP on-premises and started using Cloud Volumes ONTAP on Azure for DR.
Once the DR copy was established in Azure, the customer started to create more data copies and clones, and leverage them for other purposes:
To show an example of how this could work, we consider an on-prem NetApp appliance and a Cloud Volumes ONTAP instance in Azure Cloud called Cloud Volumes ONTAP2. The following diagram shows a minimal infrastructure to explain the concepts without the intricate network and security design.
NetApp Cloud Manager is the portal that manages Cloud Volumes ONTAP instances, Cloud Backup, on-premises ONTAP, SnapMirror relationships, data clones, and many other features.
In this article, we have shown how hybrid and multicloud environments using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP storage offer flexibility over and above what is achievable in any single domain.
The case study example scenarios show how a company can leverage a DR environment for a variety of use cases, including testing or processing, whether using read-only copies or writable FlexClone volumes—reducing overall required storage capacity and therefore costs, time to market, and storage management complexity.
Use Cloud Manager to spin up a Cloud Volumes ONTAP instance and take it for a test drive yourself—the choice of cloud is up to you.