In disk arrays, a business continuance volume (BCV) is EMC Corporation's term for an independently addressable copy of a data volume, that uses advanced mirroring technique for business continuity purposes.[1]

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)
    • least impact on production performance
    • high cost of the additional storage
    • persistent usage
  • A snapshot BCV, that uses copy on write 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

  1. "Disaster Recovery Journal". Archived from the original on 2009-08-14. Retrieved 2012-03-01.
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