Update for SQL Server customers using EMC AppSync

For those who don’t know, EMC AppSync is a product that can provide application-consistent snapshots. In the case of Windows and MS Apps, this means AppSync coordinates an array snapshot, clone, or CDP bookmark to happen at the exact same moment VSS quiesces the I/O within the application on the host. There’s a bit more to it than that, but suffice to say that is the gist of it. AppSync is slowly replacing the functionality of Replication Manager from EMC. NetApp SnapManager products offer the same basic functionality if you’re familiar with that product line.

For VNX customers, there has been a bit of a gap in support for VNX Application-consistent snapshots with SQL server. AppSync did not yet support SQL Server in the 1.0 release, but Replication Manager did not support the new VNX Snapshots, which abandon copy-on-write for redirect-on-write. So, the biggest news with this release (from my perspective) is that now VNX customers can get full application-consistency with SQL Server leveraging the new VNX Snapshots.

Other big enhancements include support for Exchange 2013 and NFS datastores in VMware.

See the release notes for a full list of new features:

https://community.emc.com/community/connect/appsync/blog/2013/06/26/announcing-appsync-15