Q: Does the new SAN integration with Azure Site Recovery replicate data to Azure?
A: Azure Site Recovery is a disaster recovery (DR) solution that enables many different types of DR replication and orchestration, including:
- Hyper-V to Hyper-V (using Hyper-V Replica)
- Hyper-V to Azure (using Hyper-V Replica)
- VMware to VMware orchestration (using InMage Scout)
- VMware (or anything else) to Azure (using InMage Scout)
- SQL Server (using SQL Server AlwaysOn)
Azure Site Recovery consists of technologies to enable replication, as well as recovery plans that include the steps to perform in the event of a disaster—which can include triggering Azure Automations (which are essentially PowerShell workflows).
Microsoft recently announced that Azure Site Recovery now includes integration with many of the major SAN vendors (see "SAN Replication based Enterprise Grade Disaster Recovery with ASR and System Center"). This integration consists of the orchestration of the SAN-based replication and failover using the SAN's own native replication technologies for a SAN-to-SAN environment. This doesn't replicate data to Azure but instead provides another integration with Azure Site Recovery to orchestratate the SAN portion of a DR failover, in addition to helping with the initial and ongoing replication configuration. This is achieved through SMI-S integration, which is managed through System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
This means as part of an Azure Site Recovery plan, items such as virtual machine failover, database failover, and now SAN failover can all be orchestrated as a single process.
