VVR enables you to create an image of the online data volumes, at a given point in time and such an image is referred to as a snapshot. The data in the original volume may change; however, the snapshot can still be used as a stable and independent copy for various purposes, including the following tasks:
to restore data both on the Primary and Secondary if the original data gets corrupted because of logical errors, administrative errors, or media errors such as disk failures.
to verify the Disaster Recovery (DR) readiness of the DR site or perform fire drill activities. The VCS fire drill feature uses space-optimized snapshots to support testing on the DR site.
to create a copy of the data for application development or testing.
to support off-host processing for applications such as Decision Support Systems (DSS) or for report generation.
to perform online data verification of the volumes in an RVG when replication is in progress.
to retain a consistent copy of the Secondary data volumes during Data Change Map (DCM) resynchronization.
The snapshot feature in VVR is the same as the snapshot feature in VxVM, because VVR is fully integrated with VxVM. In VVR, an RVG is a group of VxVM volumes; therefore, taking a snapshot of an RVG is the same as taking a snapshot of the data volumes in the RVG. VVR enables you to create traditional and instant snapshots.