Anthony Nocentino digs into some very neat and very expensive things:
I’ve been rebuilding my three-site SQL Server demo lab, and I ran into something I’ve wanted for a long time. If you’ve ever designed a SQL Server environment on ActiveCluster, you know the pattern: two FlashArrays running a synchronously replicated pod for zero RPO between sites, and a third array somewhere else for a longer retention, disaster recovery copy. The problem was that you couldn’t get the data to that third array directly from the pod. Protection groups inside a stretched pod simply couldn’t have an array target.
That’s changed, and it’s been possible longer than a lot of us realize. You can create a protection group inside an ActiveCluster pod, add a third FlashArray as a target, and asynchronously replicate snapshots to it on a schedule. Your synchronously replicated data gets a third copy, and you don’t have to build a parallel set of non-pod volumes to make it happen.
In this post, I’m going to show you how to configure this end to end with the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK2, so you can automate it. Let’s go.
I mean, sure, you need multiple FlashArrays to do this. But who doesn’t have a few of those floating around?