Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 SP1 Advanced Features Administrator"s Guide (5900-1503, April 2011)

For more information about the implementation of Storage Checkpoints, see the
Veritas File System Administrator’s Guide.
Veritas FlashSnap Agent for Symmetrix
The EMC TimeFinder product from EMC is a business continuance solution that
allows you to create and use copies of EMC Symmetrix devices while the standard
devices remain online and accessible. Business Continuance Volume (BCV) devices
contain copies of Symmetrix standard (STD) devices and provide redundancy.
You can temporarily detach the BCV mirrors and use the BCVs to perform backups,
testing, and other administrative tasks.
Veritas FlashSnap Agent for Symmetrix provides a set of commands that allow
you to use the EMC TimeFinder split and restore operations in conjunction with
VxFS file systems and VxVM disk groups and volumes that have been created on
Symmetrix STD devices.
You can use the commands in Veritas FlashSnap Agent for Symmetrix to:
■ Associate a disk group with a BCV disk group, or Symmetrix STD devices in a
disk group with identical BCV devices.
■ Initiate TimeFinder mirroring for Symmetrix STD devices in a disk group.
■ Split Symmetrix STD devices from their BCV devices and create duplicate
volumes on the BCV devices. You can use the resulting BCV volumes for
administrative tasks such as backups and testing.
■ Reattach and resynchronize the STD and BCV devices. The devices can be
remirrored from the STD copy or restored from the BCV copy.
■ Detach the STD devices from their BCV devices.
Point-in-time copy use cases
The following typical activities are suitable for point-in-time copy solutions
implemented using Veritas FlashSnap:
■ Data backup—Many enterprises require 24 x 7 data availability. They cannot
afford the downtime involved in backing up critical data offline. By taking
snapshots of your data, and backing up from these snapshots, your
business-critical applications can continue to run without extended downtime
or impacted performance.
You can use FlashSnap to implement regular online backups of databases and
cluster file system volumes:
See “About online database backup” on page 155.
See “About off-host cluster file system backup” on page 167.
Understanding point-in-time copy methods
Point-in-time copy use cases
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