Overview
This section describes the background, definition, and benefits of HyperSnap for file systems.
Background
With the rapid development of information technologies, enterprises' business data has exploded, making data backups more important than ever. Traditionally, mission-critical data is periodically backed up or replicated for data protection. However, traditional data backup approaches have the following issues:
- A large amount of time and system resources are consumed, leading to high backup costs. In addition, the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for data backup are long.
- The backup window and service suspension time are relatively long, unable to meet mission-critical service requirements.
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 duration of time within which service data must be restored after a disaster. For example, an RTO of 1 hour means that in case of a disaster, the service data needs to be restored in 1 hour.
- RPO is a defined period of time in which data can be lost but services can still continue. For example, if a service could handle an RPO of 20 minutes, it would be able to experience a disaster, lose 20 minutes of data, and still be able to work normally.
- A backup window is the optimal time to perform a backup without seriously affecting application operations.
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.
OceanStor storage systems can only generate read-only file system snapshots.
Definition
A file system snapshot is an available point-in-time copy of a source file system. Application servers can read file system snapshots.
HyperSnap for file systems has the following advantages:
- Supports online backup, without the need to stop services.
- If the source file system is unchanged since the previous snapshot, the snapshot occupies no extra storage space; if the source file system has been changed, only a small amount of space is required to store the changed data.
- Enables quick restoration of the source data at multiple points in time.
Benefits
Table 1-1 describes the benefits of HyperSnap for file systems.
Benefit |
Description |
|---|---|
Efficient use of storage space, protecting user investments |
A file system snapshot and its source file system share the storage space. You do not need to plan independent storage space for snapshots. |
Independent snapshot data, accessible to various applications |
File system snapshots are independent of each other. Clients can access snapshots created at different points in time to complete different application purposes (such as data analysis and application testing). |
