Multi-Site Stretch Cluster and Disaster Recovery Protection with Hitachi Storage and VMware Cloud Foundation

“Business Continuity or Bust: Closing the Gaps in Enterprise Resilience” highlights the urgent need for enterprises to have robust systems in place to stay operational during disruptions. It emphasizes that without a comprehensive business continuity strategy covering failover, disaster recovery and data protection organizations risk significant downtime, data loss. In today’s digital world, continuity isn’t optional, it’s essential for survival and success.

Solving Key Infrastructure Challenges with a 3-DC Metro Storage Cluster on VCF

Enterprises today face critical demands around uptime, data protection and scale. By combining VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One in a 3-Datacenter Metro Storage Cluster augmented by VMware Live Site Recovery, you can directly address every major pain point:

1. Unplanned Downtime & Service Disruptions

Problem: Hardware failures, regional outages can bring down mission-critical services.

Solution:

• The 3-Datacenter Metro Storage Cluster ensures continuous operation even if one site fails.
• Synchronous mirroring between Site 1 and Site 2 guarantees no data loss and near-zero downtime.

2. Risk of Data Loss

Problem: Without real-time replication and consistent backups, organizations can suffer permanent data loss.

Solution:

• Site 1 and Site 2 maintain full data parity via synchronous mirroring.
• Site 3 adds an extra layer of protection with asynchronous replication to a secondary region, ensuring long-term retention and disaster recovery even during catastrophic failures.

3. High Recovery Time (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)

Problem: Legacy recovery setups require manual interventions, leading to extended recovery windows.

Solution:

• Automated failover between sites using VCF Automation and VMware Live Site Recovery reduces RTO and RPO dramatically.

4. Siloed Infrastructure Management

Problem: Managing traditional VMs and container workloads across geographies creates operational complexity.

Solution:

• VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) offers a unified platform for private and hybrid cloud deployments, simplifying lifecycle management, patching, and scaling.
• Integration with Hitachi VSP One Block streamlines storage across both workload and management domains.

5. Sustainability

Problem: Data center sustainability and decarbonization are a common goal across all of our enterprise customers, which involve implementing strategies to reduce the environmental impact of data centers, such as improving infrastructure efficiency.

Solution:

·        Energy Star Certified: Our latest VSP One Block is recognized by Energy Star for its energy efficiency, helping organizations reduce their carbon footprint and operating costs.

·        Reduced Power Consumption: VSP One Block aims to keep power consumption within budget, as guaranteed here: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/pdf/datasheet/hitachi-virtual-storage-platform-one-block-datasheet.pdf

6. Ransomware Protection Ready

Problem: In 2025, ransomware attacks were on the rise yet again, with notable increases in attacks targeting critical infrastructure. According to BlackFog, the first quarter of 2025 saw a record number of disclosed attacks, with a 45% increase compared to the same period in 2024.

Solution:

·        VSP One Block family of storage systems offer Safe Snap, our immutable snapshot technology.

·        Safe Snap integrates with industry-leading ransomware protection and recovery solutions to offer unparalleled cyber resiliency using vaults, digital twins, automated recovery testing, and security tools.

·        Meet your data sovereignty compliance rules and polices – Safe Snap and vault data stay within your datacenter sites and are not dependent on public cloud infrastructure!

Solution highlights:

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) streamlines infrastructure management to boost innovation and agility for both traditional VMs and container workloads. It provides a unified, software-defined framework for building and managing private and hybrid clouds, reducing costs while improving operational control. By designating Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One Block as the primary (principal) storage for both management and workload domains and integrating with tools like Global active device (GAD), Hitachi universal replicator (HUR), VMware Live Site Recovery (VLSR), it achieves true multi-site resiliency across diverse availability zones and regions, while improving power efficiency and cyber resiliency over other storage alternatives. At its core, a 3-Datacenter Metro Storage Cluster architecture ensures that operations remain uninterrupted even if one site fails by coordinating workloads across three geographically distinct data centers to maintain data consistency, manage client requests, and support seamless failover.

In this architecture, Site 1 serves as the primary site in Availability Zone 1 of region 1, hosting most production workloads with high availability and real-time operations. Should Site 1 fail, operations can seamlessly transition to Site 2, which is located within the same region and designated as a secondary site. Site 2 employs synchronous mirroring with Site 1 to ensure optimal data synchronization and no data loss during switchover. Notably, both sites can function as primary sites for different workload domains, effectively acting as two distinct availability zones within a metro-distanced stretch cluster. Meanwhile, Site 3, positioned in region 2, functions as a disaster recovery or backup site, providing additional redundancy through asynchronous data backup and archiving, which ensures operational continuity in extreme scenarios where both Site 1 and Site 2 are unavailable.

Hitachi Integrated System is a highly scalable VMware Cloud Foundation solution that allows independent scaling of server, network, and storage resources to optimize performance and eliminate overprovisioning. The infrastructure spans three datacenters, with each integrated system incorporating at least one Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). A vSphere Metro Storage Cluster is set up between Site 1 and Site 2 - two availability zones within a single region using a global-active device to provide a stretched, active-active VMware datastore. With a distance typically less than 100 km this configuration supports vSphere HA to automatically restart failed VMs during unplanned outages and enables live migration via vMotion between the sites during planned maintenance windows. Additionally, VMware Live Site Recovery (Site Recovery Manager) is configured between region 1 (Site 1 & 2) and region 2 (Site 3), which are geographically dispersed. In this setup, Hitachi Universal Replicator (HUR) ensures asynchronous data replication from Site 1 to Site 3, with a delta re-sync configured between Site 2 and Site 3 as a standby backup, so that in the event both Site 1 and Site 2 fail, the VM workloads can be recovered on Site 3.

Conclusion:

This solution ensures continuous, high-performance operations by leveraging an active-active VMware Metro Storage Cluster across Site 1 and Site 2 with zero data loss, while a geographically dispersed Site 3 provides asynchronous disaster recovery. The Hitachi Integrated System’s modular scaling and multi-site replication deliver robust availability, seamless failover and efficient resource utilization. No other engineered solution can provide true-cloud resiliency, with maximum power efficiency, while maintaining data sovereignty using the most performant and cyber-resilient infrastructure for VMware Cloud Foundation.

For a comprehensive overview, please refer to the reference architecture paper available at the here.