About Seeding - Dell PowerVault DL4000 User Manual

Text Box Description
Replication to a Local The target core is located in a local data center or on-site location, and replication is
Location maintained at all times. In this configuration, the loss of the Core does not prevent a recovery.
Replication to an Off- The target core is located at an off-site disaster recovery facility for recovery in the event of a
site Location loss.
Mutual Replication Two data centers in two different locations each contain a core and are protecting agents and
serving as the off-site disaster recovery backup for each other. In this scenario, each core
replicates the agents to the Core that is located in the other data center.
Hosted and Cloud AppAssure MSP partners maintain multiple target cores in a data center or a public cloud. On
Replication each of these cores, the MSP partner lets one or more of their customers replicate recovery
points from a source core on the customer's site to the MSP's target core for a fee.
Possible replication configurations include:
Point to Point Replicates a single agent from a single source core to a single target core.
Multi-Point to Replicates multiple source cores to a single target core.
Point

About Seeding

Replication begins with seeding: the initial transfer of deduplicated base images and incremental snapshots of the
protected agents, which can add up to hundreds or thousands of gigabytes of data. Initial replication can be seeded to
the target core using external media to transfer the initial data to the target core. This is typically useful for large sets of
data or sites with slow links.
NOTE: While it is possible to seed the base data over a network connection, it is not recommended. Initial seeding
involves potentially very large amounts of data, which could overwhelm a typical WAN connection. For example, if
the seed data measures 10 GB and the WAN link transfers 24 Mbps, the transfer could take more than 40 days to
complete.
The data in the seeding archive is compressed, encrypted, and deduplicated. If the total size of the archive is larger than
the space available on the removable media, the archive can span across multiple devices based on the available space
on the media. During the seeding process, the incremental recovery points are replicated to the target site. After the
target core consumes the seeding archive, the newly replicated incremental recovery points automatically synchronize.
Seeding is a two-part process (also known as copy-consume):
• The first part involves copying, which is the writing of the initial replicated data to a removable media source.
Copying duplicates all of the existing recovery points from the source core to a local removable storage device
such as a USB drive. After copying is complete, you must then transport the drive from the source core location
to the remote target core location.
• The second part is consuming, which occurs when a target core receives the transported drive and copies the
replicated data to the repository. The target core then consumes the recovery points and uses them to form
replicated agents.
NOTE: While replication of incremental snapshots can occur between the source and target cores before seeding
is complete, the replicated snapshots transmitted from the source to the target remains "orphaned" until the initial
data is consumed, and they are combined with the replicated base images.
NOTE: In this scenario, customers only have access to their own data.
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