Dell PowerStore 9000T EMC PowerStore Protecting Your Data - Page 5

1 Introduction This chapter contains the following information: Topics: • Data protection in PowerStore • Snapshots • Replication • Protection policies Data protection in PowerStore There are two main ways you can protect your data using the PowerStore Manager: snapshots and replication. Snapshots are point-intime copies of a volume, volume group, virtual machine, or file system. Replication duplicates storage data to a remote system for redundancy in the event of a disaster. You can take snapshots of volumes, volume groups, virtual machines, and file systems. You can only replicate volumes and volume groups. Any snapshots taken on the volumes and volume groups are also replicated. In PowerStore, you create custom protection policies that contain rules for snapshot creation, replication, or both. Resources can be quickly and easily protected by applying a protection policy. Snapshots Snapshots are read-only, point-in-time copies of data of a volume, volume group, virtual machine, or file system. Using snapshots, you can easily protect your data locally. For file systems, you can create two different read-only file snapshot access types: protocol and .snapshot. The default access type is protocol, which can be exported as an SMB share, NFS export, or both. You can share and mount the snapshot on a client like any other file system. For .snapshot access types, you can access the files within the snapshot from the production file system in the.snapshot subdirectory of each directory. You can also create write-order consistent and application consistent snapshots. Local and remote protection holds all writes on the volume group members to provide a uniform point-in-time copy across all member volumes. Applying write-order consistency to volume groups ensures consistent protection across all volume group members. You can only create write-order consistent snapshots from PowerStore Manager. To create application consistent snapshots, use AppSync. AppSync ensures all incoming I/O for a given application is quiesced while a snapshot is taken. You can take application consistent snapshots on a volume or a volume group. You can verify whether a snapshot is write-order consistent or application consistent from the snapshot tables for volumes or volume groups in PowerStore Manager. You can manually take snapshots at any time, or you can configure snapshot rules and assign them to the relevant volumes or volume groups. The system automatically takes snapshots of the specific object at a schedule that is specified in the rules. If the files or data are corrupted or accidentally deleted, you can recover data from the snapshots or restore the volume or volume group to a specific point in time when the snapshot was taken. You can perform the following snapshot operations within the PowerStore Manager: • Take a snapshot from the Protection card in the Overview page of the storage resource. • Clone a snapshot from the Protection card in the Overview page of the storage resource. • Delete a snapshot from the Protection card in the Overview page of the storage resource. • Refresh the data of a storage resource from the More Actions menu of the storage resource or snapshot. • Restore a storage resource from the More Actions menu of the storage resource or snapshot. • Configure, view, and manage snapshot rules from the Policies page. Introduction 5