EMC Invista
SAN Recovery - EMC Invista
EMC Invista is a storage virtualization software solution that enables seamless data migration between two storage devices. The software runs on selected models of storage area network (SAN) switches from Cisco and Brocade.
EMC Invista enables enterprises to centralize and streamline storage management. They can move, copy, and migrate data across multiple tiers of heterogeneous stroage arrays without disruption.
In addition to the data migration feature, EMC Invista also features volume management, cloning and snapshots functionalities. Invista is based on Split-Path Architecture (SPA) to manage data flows. It uses Java-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) called Invista Element Manager.
The ‘intelligent’ switches redirects the control commands such as SCSI inquiry, read capacity or report LUNs to a pair of redundant external controllers called Control Path Cluster (CPC). The switch hardware offers the route for the stream of I/O transactions directly from the host to the physical storage array.
In the latest release of EMC Invista, the communication between CPC and the switch is enabled using SNMP over an Ethernet connection. Future versions may use in-band Fibre Channel communication.
An important aspect of Invista is that it can be configured in a redundant and highly available fashion, so it avoids all possible single point of failure.
