VERITAS FlashSnap Point-In-Time-Copy Solutions Administrator's Guide

Chapter 1, Point-In-Time Copy Solutions
Applications of Point-in-Time Copy Solutions
3
Point-In-Time Copy Scenarios
Point-in-time copies of volumes allow you to capture an image of a database or file system at a
selected instant for use in applications such as backups, decision support, reporting, and
development testing.
Point-in-time copy solutions may additionally be configured to use off-host processing to remove
much of the performance overhead on a production system.
The following chapters describe how you can use FlashSnap to implement regular online backup of
database and cluster file system volumes, to set up a replica of a production database for decision
support:
◆ Online Database Backup
◆ Off-Host Cluster File System Backup
◆ Decision Support
Three types of point-in-time copy solution are considered in this document:
◆ Primary host solutions where the copy is processed on the same system as the active data. See
“Implementing Point-In Time Copy Solutions on a Primary Host” on page 10 for more
information.
◆ Off-host solutions where the copy is processed on a different system from the active data. If
implemented correctly, such solutions have almost no impact on the performance of the
primary production system. See “Implementing Off-Host Point-In-Time Copy Solutions” on
page 12 for more information.
◆ Using Storage Checkpoints to quickly roll back a database instance to an earlier point in time.
See “Database Recovery” on page 61 for more information.