SnapMirror Data Replication

What do you like best?

What I would say is the most helpful about SnapMirror Data Replication is the speed and we are able to replicate and restore, we are also using data replication for redundancy and cross site data protection.

What do you dislike?

At this point I am not entirely sure I can come up with any dislikes, we are using SnapMirror Data Replication and SnapVault also and combined they provide a great solution. But saying that with SnapMirror you don't have automatic fail-over of any sort. You need to break SnapMirror relationship and present data to clients manually. Then synchronise volumes when problem is fixed. This is something that we manually do regularly to insure the fail-over process works.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

NetApp SnapMirror Data Replication is a very easy, powerful and great technology, I have been using NetApp as a customer for over 16 years and every new version on ONTAP provides additional functionality that in most cases expands the ability to provide high availability and stability.

The integration with CIFS, NFS is also simply outstanding when i comes to simplicity and reliability I believe that NetApp is years ahead of the game.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are moving the NDMP backups by using SnapMirror and SnapVault solution for speed of backup and recovery. Also using SnapMirror Data Replication for redundancy sites.

I would have Primary site SnapMirror Data Replicated to Secondary site and than SnapVault to a third site for longer term retention. SnapMirror provides protection from data corruption inside a volume.