Solution Brief

Dell Compellent Live Volume

Dell Compellent
Live Volume

Avoid downtime for planned

outages
Balance workloads on demand
Dynamically deploy resources
across a private cloud
Deploy rich set of replication
topologies
Easily manage multiple sites

Existing data protection technologies are geared towards protecting data

and delivering business continuity in the event of a disaster. A vast majority of
outages are due to planned events such as hardware or software upgrades,
system reconfigurations and expected severe weather events. IT organizations
need a new business continuity solution that helps eliminate downtime related
to anticipated data center activity. Additionally, such a solution should deliver
the flexibility to handle on-demand capability and built-in automation for
virtualized data centers and the cloud.

What is Live Volume

Dell Compellent Live Volume is an innovative software feature designed to
deliver dynamic business continuity. This feature can help you keep applications
online and data accessible during planned or unplanned downtime. Live Volume
provides a layer of virtualization that enables a physical server or a virtual machine
to share a virtual storage volume
between two Compellent
SANs in semi-synchronous and
synchronous configurations. In
this sense, Live Volume acts as a
storage hypervisor.
With Live Volume you can create
shared volumes live volumes
between paired storage arrays,
a primary and secondary. Live
Volume virtualizes the volume
presentation separating it from
disk and RAID groups within
each storage system. This
virtualization enables
decoupling of the volume
presentation to the host from
its physical location on a
particular storage array. As a
Figure 1. Live Volume: How it works
result, promoting the secondary
storage array to primary status
is transparent to the hosts. The paired SANs can be collocated in the same
data center or in two distinct locations. Designating a volume as a live volume
eliminates the need for preplanning or predefinition.
Live Volume supports all major virtualized server components, including VMware
vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Oracle VM environments.

Figure 2. Types of outages

Live Volume use cases

Automatic storage migration for virtualized environments
Live Volume automatically detects when a virtual machine
moves from one physical server to another and automatically
swaps the roles between the primary and secondary systems.

are journaled if link failure or slowness occurs. Changes are

sent to a remote host when the link is reestablished. The new
synchronous replication feature delivers the flexibility to deliver
the consistency assurances to meet your business needs.

Zero downtime maintenance

Live Volume non-disruptively migrates all volumes from one
Storage Center to another, enabling continuous operation for all
applications and volumes. This capability lets you promote the
remote site as primary, and perform maintenance on the local
site without affecting production workload.

Managed replication to a third node

SC6.5 introduces a new type of replication that further extends
the value proposition of the Live Volume solution. A managed
replication is a replication mode where a third DR site can be set
up to track the primary volume. Managed replication supports
both asynchronous and synchronous replication modes. During
a swap role, the managed replication will move its source
volume to the swapped storage center transparently. This
feature further extends the value of Live Volume by enabling
the provisioning of rich replication topologies (Figure 3) to meet
advanced business needs.

Disaster avoidance
In the event of potential outages due to environmental, like
hurricanes, or other causes, any downtime can be eliminated by
promoting the remote site to primary status
On-demand load distribution
Because Live Volume virtualizes the storage resources,
workloads can be transparently migrated across data centers to
achieve better capacity and performance utilization.

Storage Center 6.5: Extending the value proposition

Storage Center (SC) 6.5 enhances the value of Live Volume
feature in four key ways.
Synchronous replication support
SC 6.5 introduces a more capable synchronous replication
capability between volumes within a Live Volume. If you need
higher consistency assurance, leverage the Synchronous High
Consistency mode. In this mode, all writes are immediately
replicated to the secondary site before a completion is sent
to the host. This ensures that primary volume and replica are
identical.
You can also leverage the Synchronous High Availability mode
to achieve a slightly delayed consistency. In this mode, writes

Flexible replication policy management

Enhancements to SC6.5 extend the industry-leading, easy-touse Compellent family to replication management. With these
enhancements, you can now change the replication relationship
between the primary and secondary sites on demand at
any time. You can change the replication relationship from
asynchronous to synchronous, and vice versa on the fly thereby
adjusting the Live Volume deployment to more closely align
with the business requirements.
Transparent replication relationship transitions
Primary and secondary site promotion/demotion operations
can easily be performed through the Enterprise Manager GUI.
During such operations, managed replications to a third site
have to be transitioned carefully. Enhancements in SC6.5
transparently handles these transitions while maintaining the
host visible volume identity and preserving the Live Volume
relationships.

Figure 3. Managed replication topologies

Summary
Live Volume is a versatile software solution for implementing
flexible topologies to meet your business continuity and data
recovery needs. Regardless of whether your data center spans
a campus, metro or geographically disperse areas, Live Volume
combined with managed replication lets you set up topologies

Learn More at Dell.com/Compellent.

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to meet a wide variety of business requirements. Furthermore,

the tight integration with Enterprise Manager for easy site
promotion coupled with flexible replication policy management
helps you meet RPO/RTO objectives in a variety of situations.