HP StorageWorks Application Recovery Manager Administrator's Guide (T4395-96004, February 2008)

Introduction
Overview
Chapter 1 5
instant recovery (IR) functionality, which enables recovery of vast
amount of data in minutes rather than hours. This makes ZDB and IR
capabilities suitable for high-availability systems and mission-critical
applications.
Application Recovery Manager ZDB and IR techniques utilize mirror and
snapshot technologies of disk-based arrays. The following are the basic
principles behind ZDB and IR:
• Create, at high speed, a copy of the data to be backed up and then
perform backup operations on the copy, rather than on the original
data.
• Restore a backup copy of data, held on the array, to its original
location on the array to facilitate high-speed recovery
Backup Types
Application Recovery Manager supports only full backups.
The following backup types are available with the Application Recovery
Manager VSS integration:
•Local VSS backup
The shadow copy is backed up from the application system.
• Transportable backup
Instead of presenting the volume shadow copies to the application
system they are presented to an alternate system thus reducing the
impact of post backup activities, such as consistency checking. It also
provides the option to mount the backup replicas on a backup system.
Instant recovery
Instant recovery is a process in which a replica, produced by a VSS
hardware provider, is used to restore the contents of the source volumes
to their states at the time at which the replica was created. This process
consists of the preparation and actual recovery of data and, optionally,
some post-restore actions that make that data ready for use.
The Application Recovery Manager internal database (IDB) keeps track
of data, such as, which replicas from which system are kept on a
particular disk array. The IDB provides fast and convenient access to the
data to be recovered.