The Replication Accelerator feature in Cisco® Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) Software offers an easy-to-use, cost-effective, and highly reliable solution to optimize replication traffic between remote data centers. Storage administrators, responsible for disaster recovery and bulk data-transfer operations, deploy Cisco WAAS Replication Accelerator to help meet recovery point objectives (RPOs) and control network bandwidth costs by reducing replication windows, shortening time to recovery, and fully utilizing high-throughput network bandwidth.
Features and Benefits
Optimizing storage replication operations over your WAN between data centers is a different challenge from optimizing application traffic for remote users on the same WAN. Whereas remote users care about fast access to data over low-bandwidth WAN connections, in carrying out disaster recovery operations you face these core challenges:
• Lack of sufficient backup or replication windows
• Inability to fill a high-throughput WAN connection due to latency and packet loss issues
• High cost of bandwidth for data center storage replication
• Need to increase the distance of the disaster recovery site
While the amount of critical data to be protected against disaster continually grows, the time allocated for replicating that data does not. Even if storage arrays are set up to send more data, their TCP stacks are handicapped by issues such as latency and packet loss due to the long distance separating disaster recovery sites. You need a solution that can help effectively fill up the high-throughput WAN connection.
Cisco WAAS Replication Accelerator provides the following major benefits:
• Complete data center storage replication jobs into shorter replication windows: By reducing redundant data and by data compression, the solution raises utilization of WAN connections to transfer more data between data centers, thus improving the RPO.
• High efficiency in WAN bandwidth for data center storage replication: By helping to get data quickly and efficiently to one or multiple disaster recovery sites, Cisco WAAS helps you delay or prevent the need to upgrade expensive WAN bandwidth for disaster recovery.
• Extend the distance between disaster recovery sites for regulatory compliance: By removing latency and packet loss as serious concerns, Cisco WAAS allows your remote disaster recovery sites to be farther away from the primary data center to lower the risk of a disaster striking both sites.
The Cisco WAAS Replication Accelerator mode is optimized for WAN links from 20 Mbps up to OC-12 (622 Mbps) and with latency greater than 20 ms. (For data-center storage replication over small WAN links, the application accelerator mode works just as well.) Figure 1 shows the effect on your operations.
Figure 1. Cisco WAAS Replication Accelerator
The volume of traffic in data-center replication can consume the full cache of a WAN optimization, thus the replication traffic should be isolated from other traffic. Cisco WAAS Replication Accelerator sets up that traffic bypass as well as optimizing the data-center storage replication traffic.
To overcome the limitations of your WAN and meet your disaster recovery objectives at a lower cost, Cisco WAAS Replication Accelerator offers the features and benefits listed in Table 1.
Table 1. Features and Benefits
Feature
Benefit
Autodiscovery
Provides ease of deployment and configuration with no disruption of network (Layer 3) services, leading to lower cost of operation. A Cisco Wide Area Application Engine (WAE) device set up in Replication Accelerator mode negotiates optimization policies autmatically with like peers configured in Replication Accelerator mode, easing deployment for high-availability implementations.
Autoconfiguration
Reduces manual configuration of data flows for optimization without disturbing existing network topologies and systems. Services and application traffic policies automatically optimize data-center storage replication traffic and bypass regular application traffic. TCP buffers are tuned by default for WAN links between data centers.
High-speed links optimization
TCP flow optimization service available in Cisco WAAS addresses issues inherent in the TCP protocol such as packet loss and latency, which increase in high-speed WAN links. Data redundancy elimination processing is done directly in memory for high performance.
Traffic interception methods
Can intercept traffic for acceleration in inline mode or out of band (WCCPv2).
Data-store persistency across reboots
Provides quick recovery and continuation of interrupted replication operations by preserving the data cache, increasing performance and reliability.
Automatic isolation of branch and data center replication traffic
Reduces manual configuration for cache management and traffic separation. Cisco WAE devices in Replication Accelerator mode prioritize data-center storage replication traffic while bypassing application traffic, if intercepted by the device, and ignore traffic optimized by application accelerators in other Cisco WAE devices, allowing the devices to run simultaneously in the same network without interference.
High availability and scalability
• Can be deployed in a cluster of up to 32 Cisco WAE devices for easy scalability using WCCPv2 using 4-port NICs with fail-to-wire capability for greater network uptime.
• Accelerated out-of-path deployment using WCCPv2 with Cisco Catalyst® 6500 Series switches improves scalability while offering integration into the full range of data center topologies.
• Integrated solution with Cisco MDS multilayer switches to provide Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) acceleration with port channels to aggregate Fibre Channel traffic and improve resilience.
• Failure prevention through port channels in Cisco MDS switches extends FCIP to earlier Fibre Channel storage devices, protecting investment and helping ensure easy administration of mixed storage devices.
Simplified central management and monitoring
• Cisco WAAS Central Manager manages central configuration, provisioning, monitoring, fault management, logging, and reporting.
• Cisco WAAS Central Manager version 4.1 manages application acceleration between branches and data centers as well as replication acceleration between data centers.
System Requirements
Cisco WAAS Replication Accelerator is supported on the Cisco WAE-7341 and Cisco WAE-7371 appliances with Cisco WAAS Version 4.0.19.
Ordering Information
Cisco WAAS Replication Accelerator is a feature of the Cisco WAAS Enterprise License on WAE-7341 and WAE-7371 appliances.
For details, please refer to the Cisco WAE appliance data sheet.[[Please give URL if possible]]
Service and Support
Using the Cisco Lifecycle Services approach, Cisco and its partners provide a broad portfolio of end-to-end services and support that can help increase your network's business value and return on investment. This approach defines the minimum set of activities needed, by technology and by network complexity, to help you successfully deploy and operate Cisco technologies and optimize their performance throughout the lifecycle of your network.
For More Information
For more information about Cisco WAAS, contact your local account representative or visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/waas.
