EMC Centera Technical Review

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EMC Centera Technical Review


EMC Centera for Information Governance and Compliance

“Purpose-built”, active archiving platform– >5,500 customers and >370 PB shipped– >11,000 systems shipped

Assured content authenticity and online access

Highly available, high performance – Five-9s: No single point of failure

Integrity protection at all levels– Continuous disk scrubbing– Multiple file protection– Self-healing: files, data bases, disks

StorageCosts

Information’sBusinessValue


EMC Centera—An Archive Solution

Content authenticity ensures:– Internal storage—content/data faults detected and

automatically healed– Network transmissions—transmission errors detected

and transfer repeated

Easy to manage– Administrators can manage up to 50 times greater

quantity of content

Works with any application or any platform– Centralize archive silos from multiple data repositories– Enable thousands of users to share single multi-

application repository

Helps meet governance and compliance requirements

Low TCO

Content Authenticity

Easy to manage


ARCHITECTURE

Redundant Array of Independent Nodes (RAIN)

Centera node Storage nodes/access nodes 2.8 GHz P4 processor 1024 MB DDR RAM Four - 1 TB or 2 TB SATA-II Two 1 Gbit network-interfaces One 1 Gbit to outside LAN (copper/optical) A node can be in one of 3 modes

– Access node– Storage node– Access/storage node

Centera network Dual 24-port cube switches Gigabit Ethernet connections to facilitate additional

cubes Redundant connection to each node

Extreme scalability Massive parallel processing Add storage: processing power, memory, bandwidth

16-nodecube

Fournode

2 cubes/cabinet

Multiple cubes form a single cluster


Objects have metadata

<My_Archiving_Application><MagazineCover name=“Time” photo=“Annan” date=“Sep 4, 2000”/><Reviewer name=“Jones, Ted”/></ My_Archiving_Application >

Centera Stores and Retrieves Objects

Applications create metadata associated with one or more objects

Objects are stored independent of volume/directory information

ARCHITECTURE

name

date

photo


Centera Requires No Backups

Centera Dramatically reduces opportunities for errors to affect data

access or authenticity If an error occurs, it can be discovered and healed

How? Fixed content prevents data overwrites by applications Content authenticity, independent copies, self-monitoring,

self-healing– Detection and healing of bad disk blocks– Content regeneration from loss of entire disk– Detection and healing of FS errors– Content regeneration from total loss of FS

Limited configuration Human error cannot affect the archive filesystems or disks

– No active management of these resources

ARCHITECTURE


Failure Detection Remedy

Centera Failure and Self-Healing ModelARCHITECTURE

Node failureFull disk failure

•Database failure

•Block failure

Filesystem failure

•

Network failure•

Software failure

Presence of nodePresence of disk

•Database health

•Read/write errors

Disk scrubbingBlobs

MetadataBlocks

•Connectivity

•Software heartbeats

Regenerate nodeRegenerate disk

•Regenerate database

•Regenerate blob

•Regenerate filesystem

Restore data•

Alert EMC


Duplicate informationstored only once.

Regardless of how many copies of an object are sent to the Centera, the object is

only stored a single time.

ARCHITECTURE

Single Instance Storage

song G


Application stores Content Addressfor future reference

Centera performs content address calculation and

sends address back to application

Application server sends object to Centera over IP network

Object is created and sent to application server

LANCA

CA

Content Address

10001010 Digital

fingerprint

Globally unique

Location- independent

ContentAddressalgorithm

Content Addressalgorithm

10111011

ARCHITECTURE

How Centera Works: Application Example


Network switchDual, self-managedprivate LAN

Redundant power

Cube-switch

Cube-switch

Storage nodes••••••••••Storage nodes

Access/storage nodes••Access/storage nodes

Content Protection MirrorARCHITECTURE

Œ

Œ



Redundant power

Cube-switch

Cube-switch



ARCHITECTURE

Content Protection Parity



Redundant power

Cube-switch

Cube-switch



Œ

Œ

Œ

ARCHITECTURE

Regeneration—Self-Healing!


Centera Monitor

Web-based (J2EE)

Properties view

Alert views—current and historic

Performance/event views

Capacity—current and historic

Trending

MANAGEMENT


No complex storage area networking management

No LUN/RAID Group carving or allocation

No file systemmanagement

Investment protection—multi-generation hardware support

One addressable pool—ingestion machine for content

Constant validation of content objects and structures

Centera: Low TCOMANAGEMENT


Multiple “Virtual Pools” in One Physical Cluster

CDF

Blob

Pool 1

Application Pool 1

Pool 2 Application Pool 2

Pool 3

Application Pool 3

Default PoolDefault Pool

MANAGEMENT


EMC Centera

Anywhere, any time, any application, from virtually any platform

EMC Centera API

NFS/CIFS

XAM FTP

HTTP

Emulation

New

MANAGEMENT

Universal Access Makes Archiving Easy


MANAGEMENT

Centera Viewer


Centera Console

EMC Centera Console is a web-based user interface which enables administrators to monitor their EMC Centera environment.

It can be used to:

Monitor EMC Centera alerts

View capacity and performance data in real time or over a defined period

View replication topologies and status

Check the progress of self-healing tasks

Export data to comma-separated-value (CSV) and HTML file formats

MANAGEMENT


4-nodeCentera

Nondisruptive Scalability—Self Configuring!

IP Address

Rack 1

Lower cube

Upper cube

Root switches

SCALABILITY

Rack 2


Information Policy Mgmt across a large virtual archive. Serving up authenticated & secure

information wherever needed. Allowing Content to migrate freely in and out of the archive.

SCALABILITY

Centera Virtual Archive—Vision


SCALABILITY

Virtual Archive

Centera Virtual Archive: Breakthrough Technology

Ultimate scale, without disruption– Seamlessly aggregate multiple

clusters– Virtualize new and existing clusters– Increase single view capacity (PBs)

Improved manageability at scale – Applications interact with a single

virtual environment– Retrieve objects stored on any cluster – Better resource utilization of available

capacity

Eliminate geographic boundaries– Overcome the limitations of space and

distance


Centera Virtual Archive 1.0

Life time of a digital archive far exceeds the life of a computer technology; hardware, software or architecture

– Centera/VE is software, hardware and architecture agnostic

– Older and newer technology live concurrently in a Federation

– Seamless CAS functionality for different technologies in one digital archive

– Support for different Software versions

Technology agnosticAdvancing the abstraction of archive implementation

SCALABILITY

Virtual ArchiveFederation

Gen2/Gen3CentraStar 4

Gen4 (LP)CentraStar 4

GenXCentraStarX

?

Centera Virtual Archive software


Centera Virtual Archive 1.0

Install the Centera cluster

Install the Virtual Archive software

For replication, install the target site in the similar way and enable replication

The application is communicating directly with the Virtual Archive software installed on the new cluster

Virtual Archive will redirect any traffic to the existing cluster as needed

SCALABILITY

Adding Virtual Archive to an existing cluster

Centera Virtual Archive software


Source Target

Replicate all Virtual Pools Pools and replication

Replicate selected Virtual Pools

Pool 1

Pool 2

Pool 3

Pool 1

Pool 3

Pool 1

Pool 2

Pool 3

Distributed Content for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

AVAILABILITY


A study by the University of Texas reveals that only 2% of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss survive after one year. The ability to resume normal operations and productivity rapidly is a critical business requirement.

AVAILABILITY

Centera Replication

Asynchronous over IP

Unlimited distance

Unidirectional, bidirectional, chain or star

Ability to “pause” replication

No host or human resources

People are not duplicating optical platters or worm tapes

The same content address exists in both clusters

Router

Applicationserver

LAN

Router

Applicationserver

LAN


COMPLIANCE

Centera and Compliance

Centera Basic

Provides all functionality without enforcement of retention periods

Centera Governance Edition

Process-centric on the lifecycle of electronic records and enabling policies and technologies

Restricts the retention and deletion of data but does not conform to SEC regulations

Suitable for most regulations

Centera Compliance Edition Plus (CE+)

Designed for the strictest of regulation requirements, specifically SEC 17a-4

Restricts the retention and deletion of data according to SEC regulations


CentraStar provides both fixed and variable retention periods, along with an on-demand legal-hold facility

C-ClipCreated

Time

Event

fixed retention

fixed retention

event-based retention

event-based retention

delete allowed

delete allowed

event not specifiedC1

event not specifiedC2

fixed retention

event-based retentionevent not specifiedC3

delete allowed

fixed retentiondelete allowedC0

Set litigation

hold

Remove litigation hold

COMPLIANCE

CentraStar: Guaranteed Object Lifetimes


Centera—Meeting the Needs of Today’s Production Archives

Centera delivers:– A multibillion object, long-term archive– Sub-second time to first byte– Assured lifetime content authenticity– Bulletproof content protection– Five-nines availability– Low TCO

Defacto standard:– Healthcare and e-mail archiving



Archives are Complementary to Backup

Backup ArchivesCopy of information Primary information

Used for recovery operations Available for information retrieval

Improves availability by enabling application to be restored to a point

in time

Adds operational efficiencies by moving fixed/unstructured data out

of operational environment

Typically short term: days or weeks

Typically long term: months, years, even decades

Data overwritten on periodic basis: daily, weekly

Data retained for analysis or compliance


Centera Viewer

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EMC Centera Technical Review