The customer's requirements point to a three-site business continuity solution. The need for a stretched cluster for high availability is met by Pure Storage ActiveCluster, which provides a symmetric active-active, zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) solution across two sites. The requirement for a third copy in a remote geographic location is then fulfilled by configuring asynchronous snapshot replication from the ActiveCluster stretched pod to a third FlashArray. This topology combines high availability (HA) with disaster recovery (DR), directly addressing the customer's use case.

A. CloudSnap is used for backing up snapshots to a cloud object store for long-term retention or archival, not for creating a stretched cluster for high availability.

B. Fan-out replication describes a one-to-many asynchronous topology from a single source array. It does not provide the synchronous, stretched cluster capability required.

C. ActiveDR is a continuous, near-synchronous replication solution for disaster recovery with a low RPO. It is not a stretched cluster and does not provide zero RPO or transparent failover.

1. Pure Storage, "Purity ActiveCluster™ Technical Overview" White Paper (WP-AC-052021-02):

Page 4, "ActiveCluster Overview": "Pure Storage® ActiveCluster is a fully symmetric active-active bidirectional replication solution that provides synchronous replication for RPO zero and automatic transparent failover for RTO zero." This confirms ActiveCluster meets the stretched cluster requirement.

Page 11, "Three-Data-Center Replication": This section explicitly describes the requested topology: "For customers who require a three-data-center (or more) replication topology, ActiveCluster can be combined with asynchronous replication. A pod that is stretched between two arrays can also be a source for asynchronous replication to a third array."

2. Pure Storage, "FlashArray Best Practices for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery" Technical Report (TR-190801-01):

Page 11, "Figure 6: ActiveCluster with Asynchronous Replication to a Third Site": This document provides a visual diagram and description of the exact solution. The text states, "ActiveCluster can be combined with asynchronous replication to provide a third copy of data at a disaster recovery site. In this configuration, a pod is stretched between two arrays in an ActiveCluster configuration, and that pod is also the source for asynchronous replication to a third array."