In
disk array
A disk array is a disk storage system which contains multiple disk drives. It is differentiated from a disk enclosure, in that an array has cache memory and advanced functionality, like RAID, deduplication, encryption and virtualization.
Componen ...
s, a business continuance volume (BCV) is
EMC Corporation
Dell EMC (EMC Corporation until 2016) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts and Round Rock, Texas, United States. Dell EMC sells data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud c ...
's term for an independently addressable copy of a data volume, that uses advanced mirroring technique for
business continuity
Business continuity may be defined as "the capability of an organization to continue the delivery of products or services at pre-defined acceptable levels following a disruptive incident", and business continuity planning (or business continuity a ...
purposes.
Use
BCVs can be detached from the active data storage at a point in time and mounted on non-critical servers to facilitate offline
backup or
parallel computing. Once offline processes are completed, these BCVs can be either:
* discarded
* re-attached (re-synchronized) to the production data again
* used as a source to recover the production data
Types
There are two types of BCVs:
* A clone BCV is a traditional method, and uses one-to-one separate physical storage (splitable
disk mirror
In data storage, disk mirroring is the replication of logical disk volumes onto separate physical hard disks in real time to ensure continuous availability. It is most commonly used in RAID 1. A mirrored volume is a complete logical representati ...
)
** least impact on production performance
** high cost of the additional storage
** persistent usage
* A
snapshot BCV, that uses
copy on write
Copy-on-write (COW), sometimes referred to as implicit sharing or shadowing, is a resource-management technique used in computer programming to efficiently implement a "duplicate" or "copy" operation on modifiable resources. If a resource is dupl ...
algorithm on the production volume
** uses only a small additional storage, that only holds the changes made to the production volume
*** lower cost of the additional storage
*** reads and writes impact performance of production storage
** once snapshot storage fills up, the snapshot becomes invalid and unusable
** short-term usage
References
{{Reflist
External links
Analytical Intelligence On The Background Industry With Interviews & Data
Backup software
Business continuity
Dell EMC
Fault-tolerant computer systems