How to create Protection Group in Pure Flash Array using CLI

A pure Flash Array protection group is a collection of volumes, hosts, or host groups that are protected together with a point-in-time consistency across the member volumes. To achieve point-in-time consistency, Flash array uses snapshot schedules. The snapshot is an immutable representation of the volume data at that point in time that are either direct members of the protection group or are linked to any of the protection group's hosts or host groups. The members in a protection group will have common retention criteria and a snapshot schedule to achieve data integrity. 

Protection groups are considered as an asynchronous replication method in which snapshots are retained locally as well as replicated to target storage systems based on a predefined replication schedule. A single protection group can hold multiple volumes, hosts, or host groups. A single volume can also be associated with multiple protection groups.

To create a protection group, we use purepgroup create CLI command along with the following options. 

 usage: purepgroup create --hgrouplist HGROUPS |--hostlist HOSTS | --vollist VOLS --targetlist TARGETS PGROUP

common arguments:

  PGROUP                protection group name

--hgrouplist HGROUPS  host groups

--hostlist HOSTS      hosts

--vollist VOLS        volumes 

--targetlist TARGETS  target arrays

pureuser@FlasharrayX90> purepgroup create PG-LXPROD01 --vollist LXPROD01-0,LXPROD01-1 --targetlist FlasharrayX50

Name        Source           Targets          Host Groups  Hosts  Volumes

PG-LXPROD01  FlasharrayX90  FlasharrayX50  -            -      LXPROD01-0

                                                                LXPROD01-1

Once protection groups are created, we should enable the group for snapshots or replication. Enable both if needed. The common CLI usage to enable the protection group is as mentioned below. 

usage: purepgroup enable --replicate --snap PGROUP

Possible arguments are:

  PGROUP       protection group name

  --replicate  enable replication schedule

  --snap       enable snapshot schedule

pureuser@FlasharrayX90> purepgroup enable --replicate PG-LXPROD01

Name        Schedule   Enabled  Frequency  At  Blackout

PG-LXPROD01  snap       False    1h         -   -

            replicate  True     4h        -   -

Set a replication schedule using purepgroup schedule

common usage: purepgroup schedule --snap-frequency FREQUENCY --replicate-frequency FREQUENCY PGROUP

common arguments:

  PGROUP                protection group name

  --snap-frequency FREQUENCY

                        take snapshots at this frequency. N[s/m/h/d/w] e.g.

                        15m, 1h, 2d, 3w

  --replicate-frequency FREQUENCY

                        take and replicate snapshots at this frequency.

                        N[s/m/h/d/w] e.g. 15m, 1h, 2d, 3w

pureuser@FlasharrayX90> purepgroup schedule --replicate-frequency 30m PG-LXPROD01

Name        Schedule   Enabled  Frequency  At  Blackout

PG-LXPROD01  snap       False    1h         -   -

            replicate  True     30m        -   -