Overview
This section describes the background, definition, and benefits of HyperSnap.
Background
With the rapid development of information technologies, enterprises' business data has exploded, making data backups more important than ever. In traditional data backup approaches, however, the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for data backup cannot meet service requirements, and backups adversely affect service performance or even cause service interruptions.
Facing exponential data growth, enterprises' system administrators must shorten the backup window. To address these backup issues, numerous data backup and protection technologies, characterized by a short or even zero backup window, have been developed.
- RTO is the maximum acceptable period of time required to bring one or more applications and associated data back from an outage to a valid operational state.
- RPO is the maximum acceptable period of time prior to a failure or disaster during which changes to data may be lost as a consequence of recovery.
- A backup window is an interval during which a set of data can be backed up without seriously affecting applications that are using the data.
Snapshot is one of these data backup technologies. Like taking a photo, taking a snapshot is to instantaneously make a point-in-time copy of the target application state, enabling zero-backup-window data backup and thereby meeting enterprises' high business continuity and data reliability requirements.
This document describes the implementation of virtual snapshots, which is one of the many ways to implement the snapshot technology.
Definition
A snapshot is a point-in-time copy of source data that serves as a data backup accessible to hosts. It is designed to meet RTO and RPO requirements.
The OceanStor storage systems use HyperSnap technology. This technology has the following features:
- Quick snapshot generation (within seconds)
- Minimal storage space consumption
Snapshots are not full data copies and their sizes do not increase proportionally to that of the original dataset.
Benefits
Table 1-1 describes the benefits of HyperSnap.
Benefit |
Description |
|---|---|
Minimal impact on service performance |
Snapshots are created without copying data. This allows source data to be rapidly backed up and restored. |
High service data security |
Flexible time policies allow for multiple checkpoints to be set for the HyperSnap feature. Source data can be restored to snapshot states of any of these points in time, allowing for multiple layers of data protection. |
Repurposing of backup data |
The creation of snapshot copies is allowed. Snapshot copies are independent of each other and used for various purposes, including the testing, archiving, and analysis of data. This adds a secondary purpose to backup data, further meeting enterprises' varying requirements of service data. |