EMC recently made some announcements about RecoverPoint 4.0 amongst other things, and I thought it might be worthwhile briefly looking at what’s on offer. I don’t work for EMC, so if you have questions about how RP might work in your environment, or what you need to consider regarding upgrades, please contact your local EMC team.

Firstly, there’s a bunch of improvements with regards to configuration limits. Here’s a few of them:

• The number of consistency groups in group set has been increased to 8.
• The maximum number of replication sets per CG has been increased to 2048.
• The maximum number of replication sets has been increased to 8192.
• The maximum number of user volumes has increased to 16000.
• The maximum replicated capacity per cluster has been increased to 2PB.

Secondly, multi-site allows both 4:1 fan in and 1:4 fan out.

Thirdly, and my favourite, is the Virtual RecoverPoint Appliance (vRPA). Here’s some interesting things to note about the vRPA:

• Uses iSCSI. So you’ll need iSCSI SLICs in your VNX. Which leads to the next point.
• Only available for use in RP/SE configurations – so you’ll need VNX storage.
• Can be used for remote synchronous replication, as RP 4.0 supports sync over IP (assuming links are good).
• Can replicate any block data, regardless of host connectivity.

There are 4 different RP/SE configs that can be used:

• vRPA -> vRPA
• Physical RPA -> vRPA
• vRPA -> Physical RPA
• Physical RPA -> Physical RPA

Note that you cannot have vRPAs and Physical RPAs in the same cluster. The vRPAs are deployed using ovf, and come in 3 different flavours.

One finally thing to note with RP 4.0 is that host and fabric splitters are not supported; only VMAX(e), VNX, CLARiiON and VPLEX splitters are supported with RP 4.0.