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3PAR Virtual Copy Software
Built on thin copy technology, 3PAR® Virtual Copy is a reservationless, non-duplicative, copy-on-write software product that allows you to protect and share data from any application, affordably. Snapshots are available on demand, instantly, in read-only and/or read-write form. With Virtual Copy, snapshots are reservationless because capacity is never reserved up-front and non-duplicative since changed data is never duplicated within the snapshot tree.
Endless Data Flexibility At Minimal Cost
Coupled with consistency groups and support for hundreds of snapshots per base volume, Virtual Copy efficiency delivers affordable, CDP-like rapid application recovery from multiple points in time. With a single command, you can revert a base volume to any selected snapshot—without impacting other snapshots in the tree. And when you delete a snapshot, this never affects peer snapshots.
Virtual Copy also integrates with 3PAR Autonomic Groups and 3PAR Scheduler—both features which are built into the 3PAR InForm® Operating System—to automate the creation and deletion of virtual copy snapshots while giving users fine-grained control over the process. When used in conjunction with Autonomic Groups, Scheduler automates the creation of virtual copy snapshots across multiple boot and data volumes with full write consistency across all these different volumes. In combining these software capabilities, storage management is automated to reduce administration time and decrease the chance of human error.
Smart
| 3PAR Virtual Copy | Other Snapshot Approaches |
| Snapshots available instantly, in read-only and/or read-write form. | Extra time required to configure copy space and create writeable instances. |
| Developer-controlled mySnapshot functionality securely replaces/refreshes selected snapshots to speed development without burdening storage administrators. | Not available. |
| Support for consistency groups assures data integrity across volumes. | Not generally supported. |
Thin
| 3PAR Virtual Copy | Other Snapshot Approaches |
| Reservationless snapshots. Fine-grained capacity consumed only for changed data. | 20% to 100% upfront space reservation per copy. |
| Thin copy-on-writes. Changed data is never duplicated within a snapshot tree. | Fat copy-on-writes. Changed data usually duplicated for every snapshot of a base volume. |
| Snapshots of snapshots for fast, flexible sharing of data sets without the need for additional base volumes. | Often not available. |
| Revert to any snapshot with a single command, at any time. | Not easy to revert to any snapshot. May require snapshot to be copied to a new base volume. |
Ready
| 3PAR Virtual Copy | Other Snapshot Approaches |
| 128 read/write and 500 read-only snapshots per virtual volume. Affordable CDP-like rapid application recovery from multiple points in time. | Few snapshots per volume lead to brief or sparse snapshot histories. |
| Thin copy-on-write technology and massive parallelism mean little to no performance impact. | Poor snapshot performance and negative impact on production volumes. |
| Freely delete snapshots without affecting peer snapshots. | Deleting a snapshot may impact peer snapshots. |
Common Applications of 3PAR Virtual Copy:
- Rapid Application Recovery: Revert to any snapshot with a single command to recover applications quickly and minimize your recovery time objective.
- Affordable CDP-like data protection: Keep hundreds of cost-effective, reservationless, point-in-time copies online to meet your recovery point objective.
- Rapid Server Provisioning: Instantly provision new servers using a read-write copy of a read-only golden image of a standardized software stack.
- Software Development: Support test and development activities with simple and secure refresh of production data.
- Disaster Recovery Validation: Fully test remote application recovery and data integrity with a read-write snapshot of any remotely mirrored volume.
3PAR Autonomic Groups Product Brief (PDF)
Taneja Group Report: Virtual Domains (PDF)
