ONTAP 9.13

SM-BC provides the following benefits:

In an SM-BC deployment, you will have a primary and secondary cluster. A LUN in the primary cluster (1LP) will have a mirror (L1s) on the secondary; both LUNs share the same serial ID and are reported as read-write LUNs to the host. Read and write operations, however, are only serviced to the primary LUN, 1LP. Any writes to the mirror L1S are served by proxy.

With SM-BC, you can synchronously replicate multiple volumes for an application between sites at geographically dispersed locations. You can automatically failover to the secondary copy in case of disruption of the primary, thus enabling business continuity for tier one applications.

The following figure illustrates the operation of the SnapMirror Business Continuity feature at a high level.

In section one of the diagram, an application is deployed on a SVM in the primary data center. The volumes that have been added to the primary consistency group are protected with SM-BC and are mirrored to secondary consistency group at a secondary data center. The volumes in the primary consistency group will failover to the mirrored consistency group in the event of a disruption. Volumes not in a mirrored consistency group are not served in the event of a failover.