Replication Made Easy with Nimble Storage - Part II - Planning with InfoSight

Hi All,

A collegue of mine gave me a great idea to follow up my Replication Made Easy with Nimble Storage blog with a planning replication using Nimble InfoSight. (Thanks Rick!)

Setting up replication is just part of the equation, but probably a more difficult question is, how much bandwidth do you need?  You know pipes aren't cheap!  There's a really cool feature built into InfoSight that helps with data protection planning.  WHAT?!  You're still not using InfoSight?  Okay, here's the link again...  InfoSight

Hey, I'm just trying to make your life easier here!  :-)  Once you get your account, log in and you'll see a plethora of data! I'll follow this blog up with others regarding the coolness of InfoSight, but today I'm focusing on replication.

Click on the Data Protection tab.  Here you'll see all kinds of great metrics regarding your replication, but for today, click on the Planning tab.

Where was this when I was setting up replication as a system administrator?!!  Let's go through each number here. 

1.  The average weekly change rate.  This information is AWESOME!  Back when I was doing this, we had to make an educated guess.  Too much bandwidth and we'd being be paying too much, too little and replication would be horribly slow and you might not even meet your SLAs.

2 -7 allows you to drill further down into the Mbps and get REALLY specific on what is changing.

2.  Allows you to choose what the replication role is.  Do you want to see source, target, or take out unreplicated data.

3.  If you have volume collections, you can add or remove them from here.

4.  Volumes themselves can be added or removed.  Remember, not everything needs replicating, it will depend heavily on the application and how your disaster recover program is set up.

5.  The performance policies can be chosen.  Say you want to see how much data is changing in your Linux environment, but not with Exchange.

6.  With approximate interval you can further zoom in on what kind of times you want.  Does the data only change seldom or all the time?

7.  And finally the array.  If you have a dev/test array and aren't replicating it, you can deselect, etc.

When I saw this functionality I said, "Wow!"  Honestly, this really helps take out the guess work; saving you time AND money.

Until Next Time Friends,

-Brain