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Release of EMC RecoverPoint 4.0

Product description

The EMC RecoverPoint product family provides a comprehensive data protection solution for enterprise and commercial customers, providing integrated continuous data protection and continuous remote replication to recover applications to any point in time.

RecoverPoint systems enable reliable replication locally with one RPA cluster, and over any distance to up to four remote RPA clusters. RecoverPoint systems support replication of data that applications are writing to SAN-attached storage using existing Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI infrastructure to integrate seamlessly with existing host applications and data storage subsystems. For remote replication, the systems use existing connections to send the replicated data over FC and WAN, and uses FC and IP infrastructure to replicate data asynchronously or synchronously. The systems provide failover of operations to another cluster in the event of a disaster at the production cluster.

The RecoverPoint family consists of three licensing offerings:

  • RecoverPoint/CL for EMC and non-EMC storage platforms.
  • RecoverPoint/EX for EMC storage platforms (Block), licensed by storage array.
  • RecoverPoint/SE for VNX series, CLARiiON CX3 and CX4 series, and Celerra unified storage environments.
New features and changes for release 4.0
  • Support for data protection on up to five RPA clusters
    RecoverPoint now provides the capability to concurrently protect data to multiple disaster recovery sites using a single management point. For example, data can be protected locally on one RPA cluster and concurrently copied to up to four remote RPA clusters (“fan out”), or replicated from up to four remote RPA clusters to one, central RPA cluster (“fan in”). For installation and deployment information, refer to the EMC RecoverPoint Installation and Deployment Guide. For administration and replication configuration information, refer to the EMC RecoverPoint 4.0 Administrator’s Guide.
  • Virtual RPA (vRPA) with VNX splitter
    vRPA is a virtual RPA that runs as a virtual machine on VMware ESX servers. Almost all RPA functionality is available in vRPA with little or no additional limitations. Instead of HBAs and Fibre Channel, the vRPA uses iSCSI over a standard IP network; therefore, there are no hardware requirements for the vRPA other than a standard ESX server. For installation, deployment, and operating instructions, refer to EMC RecoverPoint vRPA Technical Notes.
  • SRM AnyPIT
    SRM AnyPIT enables VMware Site Recovery Manager to access point-in-time images, not only the latest RecoverPoint image. Use EMC Virtual Storage Integrator 5.5 for RecoverPoint from within the vCenter to select the image. Refer to Virtual Storage Integrator documentation for instructions.
  • Replicating the same device with both SRDF and RecoverPoint
    From RecoverPoint 4.0 and later and Symmetrix Enginuity 5876 Q2 2013 SR and later, it is permitted to replicate the same device with both SRDF and the RecoverPoint Symmetrix splitter, as long as SRDF and RecoverPoint are replicating to two different devices, and RecoverPoint is replicating only to a local copy. For details, refer to the EMC RecoverPoint Deploying with Symmetrix Arrays and Splitter Technical Notes.
  • Scale and performance improvements
    • Maximum replication throughput for a distributed consistency group, over Fibre Channel or WAN, of 400 MB/s.
    • Up to 8K production volumes, when using VNX splitters with VNX OE for Block later than 05.32.000.5.201, and when using VPLEX splitters with VPLEX GeoSynchrony 5.2.
  • Intelligent fabric-based splitters (Brocade and SANTap) and host-based splitters are not supported with RecoverPoint 4.0.
  • Unisphere for RecoverPoint (new Management Application GUI)
    The RecoverPoint GUI, renamed to Unisphere for RecoverPoint, has been completely re-developed using Adobe Flash technology and simplified to promote ease of use and a common user experience between RecoverPoint, VNX, VPLEX, and Symmetrix products.
    The new protection and recovery wizards have been streamlined and optimized for a simpler and more intuitive user experience. User inputs have been reduced, more default values have been added, preferred RPAs are automatically defined, and a dashboard has been added to provide an overall view of the system health status.
    Furthermore, all of the information displayed in the new GUI is consistently auto-refreshed and the new GUI is aligned with Unisphere’s internationalization support. Detailed information can be found in the EMC RecoverPoint 4.0 Administrator’s Guide.
  • RecoverPoint/SE is now customer upgradable – !!!
    With the release of Deployment Manager 2.0, RecoverPoint/SE 3.5 and later releases are now customer upgradable. The upgrade process has been greatly simplified and customers can now perform the RecoverPoint/SE software upgrades on their own schedule and without the need to schedule and rely on external resources. To perform the upgrade, you must download the RecoverPoint/SE Upgrade Kit and follow the instructions in the RecoverPoint/SE Upgrade Guide contained within the kit.
  • Deployment Manager 2.0
    Deployment Manager 2.0, which replaces Deployment Manager 1.1, introduces a number of changes and new features, including a new wizard to connect RPA clusters running release 4.0, the ability to install virtual RPAs, and integration with EMC Online Support site for upgrades. Furthermore, as of 4.0, deployment operations – such as installation, upgrade, and modification – are performed per RPA cluster, not per system. Refer to the RecoverPoint Installation and Deployment Guide and RecoverPoint Deployment Manager 2.0 Release Notes for more information.
  • REST API access to the RecoverPoint functional API
    The REST API provides a simple-to-use Web interface to the RecoverPoint API that third-party developers can use to integrate RecoverPoint functionality into their own applications and to script RecoverPoint operations. The REST API is documented in the EMC RecoverPoint REST API Programming Guide and Reference Technical Notes.
  • SyR improvements
    new schema has been developed that supports the new RecoverPoint multi-cluster and eLicensing features, doesn’t change whenever a class in the schema changes, and only contains fields that are required by SyR clients. When testing connectivity, the user is now prompted for a verification email address. If the connectivity test is successful, a service request containing call home event number 30999 is opened and an email is sent to the entered email address from EMC Customer Support to verify that the system reports mechanism (SyR) has been successfully configured.
  • Lag Optimizer
    RecoverPoint’s consistency group priority with regards to bandwidth allocation has been improved to substantially minimize any business damages customers may incur due to data loss in the actual case of a disaster.
  • Licensing improvements
    This feature introduces eLicensing. For existing RecoverPoint users, this enhances license tracking and management, improves overall user experience, enables less complex license upgrades, reduces the risk of non-compliance, eliminates the paper right-to-use (RTU) cards and enables self-service license creation. For licensing information, refer to the EMC RecoverPoint 4.0 Administrator’s Guide.
  • Journal and repository volumes can now be located on non-licensed arrays
    In RecoverPoint/SE and RecoverPoint/EX, journal and repository volumes can now be located on non-licensed arrays.
  • Support for sync over IP
    RecoverPoint now supports synchronous replication over IP to a remote RPA cluster.
  • FIPS 140-2 compliance
    The following FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) 140-2 validated cryptographic modules are used in RecoverPoint 4.0:

    • RSA BSAFE® Crypto-J, JSAFE, and JCE Software Modules
    • RSA® BSAFE Crypto-C Micro Edition
    • OpenSSL FIPS Object Module
      For more information about RecoverPoint security, refer to the EMC RecoverPoint 4.0 Security Configuration Guide.
  • User experience enhancements
    Many improvements have been made to ensure a better overall total customer experience in RecoverPoint 4.0:

    • Splitters residing on licensed arrays are automatically added to the system.
    • When recovering production, there is no longer a need to enable image access tothe production and resume production.
    • Snapshots now carry a consistency tag that enables the user to mark snapshots that are known to be application-consistent as such. Snapshots created using KVSS are automatically marked as application-consistent.
    • Image access is now part of the flow of the recovery wizards and is no longer performed as a separate function. An image access progress indicator and an image access log capacity indicator have both been added to the recovery wizards.
    • Users can now select an event in the event log and click “Collect System Information” to open the Collect System Information wizard and RecoverPoint will automatically set the collection start time and end time fields to 10 minutes before and after the selected event.
    • Additional RPA cluster information has been added, including; the RecoverPoint version, RPA type (physical or virtual), number of RPAs in the cluster, cluster management (LAN) IPv4 and IPv6, and the time zone of the RPA cluster.
    • Bottleneck detection and load balancing analysis are now available from the GUI.
  • Read access to replication volumes
    When using VNX or Symmetrix splitters, 4.0 supports read access to replication volumes at local and remote copies, without disrupting normal distribution of replicated data to the same volumes. As a result, the Cluster Shared Volumes feature is supported for consistency groups managed by RecoverPoint/CE 4.1.3 or later, for which “read-only” is the default splitter setting. Note that when in read-only mode, consistency and data integrity of the copy volumes are guaranteed only if the user does not mount, unmount, or otherwise manipulate those volumes. For other groups, “fail-all” continues to be the default splitter setting.
  • Multipathing performance and robustness improvements
    In 4.0, multipathing performance and robustness is improved, thereby simplifying the procedure for changing the mapping of LUNs that have already been exposed to RecoverPoint. This feature is implemented both with FC and iSCSI protocols.
RecoverPoint 4.0 product documentation:

RecoverPoint 4.0 Release Notes
RecoverPoint 4.0 Administrator’s Guide
RecoverPoint 4.0 Security Configuration Guide
RecoverPoint Replicating VMware Technical Notes
RecoverPoint Adapter for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Release Notes
RecoverPoint Deploying with VNX/CLARiiON Arrays and Splitter Technical Notes
RecoverPoint SE Upgrade Kit
RecoverPoint 4.0 ISO

9 comments to Release of EMC RecoverPoint 4.0

  • I can’t wait for RP 4.0, I will definitely be kicking the Missus out of bed for this!

    • You know, I will be the first to volunteer to do the upgrade! :)
      We also need to be compliant with VCE Support Matrix for Data Protection. The latest version is still 3.0.8 which supports EMC RecoverPoint SE, EX software 3.5 SP1 P1(o173). I hope by the time we upgrade to 5.1 Patch 1 or later, VCE will add support for RecoverPoint 4.0.

  • Caleb Snow

    Did you ever perform your RP upgrade? Any significant things to note about the update? We are OE32.x.x.x on all of our arrays.

    • I upgrade RP from 3.4.SP3.P2(m.34) to 3.5 SP1 P1. Upgrade completed without any issues.
      VNX array was on OE31 at the time of RP upgrade. The reason we upgraded RP first is that RP 3.4 would not be compatible with OE32.

  • Swapnil

    Hi Mark,

    Thanks for your inputs. We need to implement Recover Point software (not the appliance which i know how to do). Can you please suggest what does it means Recover Point software which will use VNX resources for the processing of Recover point, and any document or implementation idea you have on that please.

  • Gab

    did you ever move the RPA from the FC direct connection to the VNX to an UCS switch?
    We want to use the UCS switch as zoning FC and move all the FC connections from VNX and from RPA into that.

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