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Is it possible to replicate a LUN from our EMC VNX5300 to Amazon Web Services? This would be for a disaster recovery scenario. I've talked to AWS and they said to talk to EMC. I've talked to several EMC employees one of them being an engineer. None of them seem to understand what I'm asking.

Is it possible to replicate an entire LUN on an EMC to AWS using block level replication similar to what our primary and secondary EMC use for replication?

Whether it's some magic utility, device or service.

No I don't want to create an instance in the cloud with six 1 TB drives and do an rsync from on-premise to the cloud. This is extremely inefficient. I'm looking for a block-level replication strategy.

travmi
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It looks like there is at least one vendor with a product that does this. (By the way, I found it by searching Google for `"AWS Storage Gateway" EMC VNX

http://www.twinstrata.com/cloudarray-product-tour/

TwinStrata have recently been bought by EMC, so back to your EMC rep and ask them about CloudArray, to see if it's compatible with your existing architecture and replication strategy.

mfinni
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  • We've also looked into the Storage Gateway. This is not possible either. It completely defeats our purposes. The storage gateway requires additional on site storage in order to replicate to AWS. – travmi Dec 09 '14 at 18:07
  • Note that I didn't post a link to AWS Storage Gateway. I posted a link to EMC/TwinStrata's CloudArray. – mfinni Dec 09 '14 at 18:36
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No. Amazon S3 is what you'd need to provide this replication, but it's not block-level like Amazon EBS is (which requires an instance to be attached to it). AWS would not work in your use case.

Edit: I stand corrected. AWS Storage Gateway might work, but it troubles me that AWS didn't mention this product to you. Perhaps you need to do a bit of your own research on this.

Nathan C
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  • The AWS storage gateway says that it's only iSCSI, and I'm guessing that the device itself won't speak EMC's replication protocols (not that @travmi told us what replication method he or she is using.) Plus, you'd need a second device at wherever your recovery site is, if the primary site is down. – mfinni Dec 09 '14 at 17:21
  • I have done weeks of research on this. 3 Amazon Engineers, 2 Rackspace engineers, and 3 VMWare engineers. Rackspace can do it with Recoverpoint at a minimum of $15K a month just for the SAN replication. – travmi Dec 09 '14 at 18:09
  • I never mentioned a replication method because it's irrelevant to what I was asking. Can an EMC LUN be replicated to AWS. (meaning is there any method to get a LUN replicated to AWS) I'm not asking how to replicate an EMC to an EMC as that's done with Mirrorview, Sancopy, Recoverpoint, VNX replicator or VPLEX. – travmi Dec 09 '14 at 18:12
  • @travmi As far as I know, no you can not. It's EMC to EMC or nothing. – Nathan C Dec 09 '14 at 18:36
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    The parameters of the problem you're solving are not irrelevant. – mfinni Dec 09 '14 at 18:37
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You can not currently do this with any of the EMC offerings. I imagine that if it ever gets supported, recoverpoint would have no problem sending a copy of local writes to an amazon instance, but I can't find anything indicating that this is supported, or has ever even been tried.

Basil
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