HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform Manager user guide (AG781-96017, March 2009)

• Accelerated application testing—Snapshots enable you to radically reduce the time needed to
prepare data for test runs. Copying and staging data is reduced to minutes for each test run, res-
ulting in faster testing and faster time-to-market. Instead of copying data for each test run, you
create a PiT of the development virtual disk. This enables you to create up to 32 snapshots of the
PiT, and test modifications in parallel on the snapshots. If modifications introduce problems, you
can simply delete the affected snapshots, without losing your original data. If you want to keep
modifications that you performed on one of the snapshots, you can use the Restore feature to replace
the original virtual disk with the snapshot. PiT creation, snapshot creation, and restore are all fast
operations that are completed in minutes. The benefits are:
• Instant read/write copies of production data are created without taking applications offline.
• Data can be moved between production and test environments.
• Multiple tests on multiple copies can occur in parallel.
• Changes to test data do not affect production data.
• Minimal impact backup—Using snapshots in conjunction with a backup application enables you
to perform backup with minimal impact on production servers or on the LAN. You can perform
virtual disk backup as follows: Regularly create a PiT of the virtual disk. Create a snapshot on the
PiT and mount it on a backup server. Run your backup application on the mounted snapshot.
When the backup is complete, you can unmount and delete the snapshot, and then delete the PiT.
Backing up yields the following benefits:
• Backups can occur at any time of the day, eliminating the need to complete backups within a
window of time in order to free up production servers.
• Production systems remain online and fully available during backup. The solution uses zero
CPU cycles on production servers and zero LAN resources.
• Data can be restored from PiTs within minutes, using the rollback feature.
• Rapid restore of files and applications—Snapshots reduce data recovery time from days to minutes,
with the following possibilities:
• Schedule regular PiT creation to enable file recovery at any time.
• Recover missing or corrupted files by mounting a snapshot or PiT to a recover server, and
snapclone the missing or corrupted files from the recovery server.
• Recover a complete virtual disk using the Rollback feature.
You can:
• Work with PiTs
• Work with snapshots
• Navigate through a snapshot hierarchy
• Roll back virtual disks and VDGs
• Restore virtual disks from snapshots
• Plan the storage pool capacity you need for snapshot operations
Working with PiTs
You can:
• Create PiTs
• View PiTs
• Delete PiTs
Using snapshots194