As I discussed in an earlier column “Not All Snapshots are the Same”, storage systems that use a re-directed snapshot technique can typically maintain thousands of snapshots without impacting storage performance. But just because you can maintain thousands of snapshots, doesn’t mean you’d want to. These snapshots do eventually consume capacity and there is the additional challenge of wading through them to find the actual data you need.
For most recoveries finding data is not that big of a challenge because most restore requests are for the most recent copy of data, a.k.a. the latest snapshot. No real wading has to occur. But what if you want to leverage a snapshot-like technology to meet the demand for point-in-time copies of data, as well as long term retention capabilities? Most primary storage systems don’t provide any functional search mechanism. This makes meeting a request like “Give me the version of the June 2014 Payroll Spreadsheet” much harder to accomodate.
Copy Data to The Rescue
This is where a copy data solution may be an ideal alternative to the snapshot strategy or a replacement to it. Copy data solutions provide several capabilities that traditional snapshots do not. First, they typically provide organizations access to the snapshot process. This can sometimes be laid over the existing storage system’s snapshot capabilities, or it may be done by replacing the storage systems snapshot function altogether. Once the various instances are organized in a database, meeting specific restore requests becomes much easier.
A data protection solution based on primary storage and snapshots can acquire this search capability by using traditional backup solutions to backup the snapshots and get them organized into a database. Doing so also limits the number of snapshots that the primary storage system needs to maintain.
In addition to search capabilities a copy data solution can store the secondary copy and its point-in-time snapshots on a secondary, and potentially less expensive, storage system from an alternate vendor. Even though a primary storage system that leverages hardware-independent software defined storage (SDS) can do this too, most storage hardware vendors will require like systems throughout. Finally, the copy data solution can manage the replication of data to a DR site, relieving that burden from the storage system.
Which is Better? Copy Data or Snapshots?
To a large extent the answer depends on what storage systems are in place today and when the next storage refresh is scheduled. It also depends on how good of a job legacy backup solutions do at integrating snapshot management and data tracking into their existing code bases. Storage Switzerland has two upcoming webinars (see below) that will help you decide which is best. We encourage you to attend both of them to see which one makes the most sense for you.
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George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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