This topic introduces the point-in-time copy solutions that you can implement using the Veritas FlashSnap™ technology. Veritas FlashSnap technology requires an enterprise product license.
Veritas FlashSnap offers a flexible and efficient means of managing business critical data. It allows you to capture an online image of actively changing data at a given instant: a point-in-time copy. You can perform system backup, upgrade and other maintenance tasks on point-in-time copies while providing continuous availability of your critical data. If required, you can offload processing of the point-in-time copies onto another host to avoid contention for system resources on your production server.
The following kinds of point-in-time copy solution are supported with an enterprise license:
Volume-level solutions. There are several types of volume-level snapshots. These features are suitable for solutions where separate storage is desirable to create the snapshot. For example, lower-tier storage. Some of these techniques provided exceptional offhost processing capabilities.
File system-level solutions use the Storage Checkpoint feature of Veritas File System. Storage Checkpoints are suitable for implementing solutions where storage space is critical for:
File systems that contain a small number of mostly large files.
Application workloads that change a relatively small proportion of file system data blocks (for example, web server content and some databases).
Applications where multiple writable copies of a file system are required for testing or versioning.
File level snapshots.
The FileSnap feature provides snapshots at the level of individual files.