Introduced with the Nutanix Files™ release 3.8, Smart DR brought share-level replication between active file server instances for disaster recovery. If you’re not yet familiar with Smart DR, you can get an overview of the feature and its benefits here. Shortly after its initial release, Nutanix introduced 1-minute replication interval support with the Files 3.8.1 release.
The recent Files release 4.0 further enhances Smart DR with scalability improvements and self-service restore (SSR) integration.
Scalability
Smart DR allows for file server share replication regardless of the storage density of the physical nodes, but Smart DR did come with the limitation of supporting up to 25 shares for replication. Files 4.0 increases this limit to replicating up to 100 shares between file servers. Replication is supported down to 1-minute replication intervals for up to 25 shares. The remaining shares can support down to 10-minute intervals.
SSR Interoperability
Nutanix Files has long supported SSR snapshots, which allow end users to access previous versions of their files. With Files 4.0, Smart DR supports replicating the snapshots between the source share and its target.
The target share can have the same or different retention schedule compared to the source. For example, if the file server is configured on the source to maintain the last two hourly snapshots, you can configure the target file server to maintain the last ten hourly snapshots to provide a longer retention window. Or, you can match retention schedules to simply ensure the same SSR copies exist in both sites for any failover event.
End users, IT support engineers, or file server administrators can recover their data using the SSR copies from either the source or read-only target of the Smart DR relationship.
If you’re using Nutanix Files with Smart DR today, you can simply upgrade your environment to start taking advantage of these enhancements. If you’re new to Nutanix Files and would like to see Smart DR in action, give it a test drive and let us know what you think.
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