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| Veritas InfoScale Storage Foundation off-host processing methods | ||
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While backup and recovery is an important use case for Veritas InfoScale point-in-time copy methods, they can also be used for:
Periodic analysis (mining) of production data
Predictive what-if analysis
Software testing against real data
Application or database problem diagnosis and resolution
Off-host processing use cases are similar to the backup use case in that they generally require consistent images of production data sets. They differ from backup in the three important respects:
Access mode
Whereas backup is a read-only activity, most off-host processing activities update the data they process. Thus, Snapshot File Systems are of limited utility for off-host processing uses.
Multiple uses
Backup uses each source data image once, after which the snapshot can be discarded. With other use cases, it is often useful to perform several experiments on the same data set. It is possible to take snapshots of both Storage Checkpoints and Space-Optimized Instant Snapshots of production data. This facility provides multiple identical data images for exploratory applications at almost no incremental overhead. Rather than testing destructively against a snapshot containing the data set state of interest, tests can be run against snapshots of that snapshot. After each test, the snapshot used can be deleted, leaving the original snapshot containing the starting state intact. Any number of tests or analyses can start with the same data, providing comparable alternatives for evaluation. All such tests can be run while production applications simultaneously process live data.
Scheduling
Whereas backup is typically a regularly scheduled activity, allowing storage and I/O capacity needs to be planned, other applications of snapshots must run with little or no notice. Full-sized and space-optimized instant snapshots and Storage Checkpoints provide instantly accessible snapshots, and are therefore more suitable for these applications.
Veritas InfoScale examples for data analysis and off-host processing use cases: