Summer Gift Part 1 – Project Mercury Beta Open!

As part of celebrating summer here in the northern hemisphere, I’ve got two pieces of great news… 

The first one is that the Beta for “Project Mercury” is now open!

What is “Project Mercury”?

Well – “Project Mecury” is the “full software-ifcation” of Recoverpoint.  

Recoverpoint is a great local and remote replication tool – able to do continuous, sync, and async remote replicas, and incredible local continuous replication/recovery.   Recoverpoint can support a very high amount of replication load, complex replication topologies, and loads of consistency groups for devices that need to be replicated together. 

Recoverpoint compresses, dedupes and otherwise optimizes the WAN replication traffic in a sophisticated way.

Recoverpoint has two architectural components:

• The Recoverpoint Splitter – which needs to sit somewhere in the IO path (on the host, on the array – which is the most popular today, or somewhere in the middle – and fabric splitters tend to be the most problematic).
• The Recoverpoint Appliance (or RPA).  This is the thing which “does stuff” with the replicated stream of data from the Splitter.

Step 1 was to make the RPA a software only thing – which we did last year via the “vRPA”.   But, this would (naturally) only work with iSCSI because of the dependency to connect the VM instance to an array.

Step 2 is the full “Project Mercury”, which embeds the splitter into vSphere as well as management and control into vCenter, and uses the vRPA.  This means:

• Any customer using vSphere could get the full Recoverpoint goodness for any array/connectivity (including NFS datastores and VSAN) vSphere supports.
• Replication could be at the VM level – with any underlying array.   Pre-vVols, too…
• Replication could have rich capabilities and RPOs – not just for small customers.
• Any service provider could make a pretty killer “DR as a Service” option.

Here’s what it looks like (we’ve been working on this for a while – I previewed this in August at VMworld 2013):

The final beta cycle is running now – and we WANT YOU!   Send your Beta request to [email protected]

I can’t wait for this to come to market – lots of very happy Recoverpoint customers – this will broaden that set materially!

Comments

[Andrew Thomas]

So customers can use XtremIO SAN block and Isilon (NFS) for a VMware Hybrid Cloud tiered storage VM's replicated by RecoverPoint vRPA's.