NetApp ONTAP 9.8 Snapmirror Business Continuity (SM-BC) Configuration

 

  

Beginning with ONTAP 9.8, you can use SnapMirror Business Continuity (SM-BC) to protect applications with LUNs, enabling applications to fail over transparently, ensuring business continuity in case of a disaster.

 

Benefits

SnapMirror Business Continuity provides the following benefits:

• Provides continuous availability for business-critical applications

• Ability to host critical applications alternately from primary and secondary site

• Simplified application management using consistency groups for dependent write-order consistency

• The ability to test failover for each application

 

Role of Mediator

ONTAP Mediator provides an alternate health path to the peer cluster, with the intercluster LIFs providing the other health path. With the Mediator’s health information, clusters can differentiate between intercluster LIF failure and site failure. When the site goes down, Mediator passes on the health information to the peer cluster on demand, facilitating the peer cluster to fail over. With the Mediator-provided information and the intercluster LIF health check information, ONTAP determines whether to perform an auto failover, if it is failover incapable, continue or stop.

 

Hardware

• Only two-node HA clusters are supported

• Both clusters must be either AFF or ASA (no mixing)

Software

• ONTAP 9.8 or later

• ONTAP Mediator 1.2 or later

• A Linux server or virtual machine for the ONTAP Mediator running one of the following:

◦ RedHat Enterprise Linux 7.6 or 7. 7

◦ CentOS 8.0 or 8.1

Licensing

• SnapMirror synchronous (SM-S) license must be applied on both clusters

• SnapMirror license must be applied on both clusters

 

Supported protocols

• Only SAN protocols are supported (not NFS/CIFS)

• Only Fibre Channel and iSCSI protocols are supported

 

Steps to Implement SM-BC: