Home > Storage > PowerMax and VMAX > Data Protection > Dell EMC PowerMax and VMAX All Flash: Snapshot Policies > Overview
In today’s digital age, the growth of data being stored increases the importance of data-protection and recovery options. The high frequency of online transactions magnifies the implications of an outage. During a data-availability issue due to accidental or malicious activity, the ability to quickly and surgically recover from data loss is critical. Applications must be able to recover from a large selection of granular, point-in-time images.
As important as these recovery options are, many business leaders cannot afford to dedicate valuable resources to creating, maintaining, and monitoring backup data. Protecting applications must be done as easily as possible and with confidence that protection is provided as expected.
Designed to address these challenges, the snapshot policies feature is included with the PowerMaxOS Q3 2020 release for Dell EMC PowerMax and VMAX All Flash storage arrays. This feature provides automated scheduling of SnapVX snapshots using a highly available and flexible policy engine that runs internally on the storage array. Snapshot policies can be managed through Dell EMC Unisphere for PowerMax, REST API, and Solutions Enabler.
Snapshot policies can be customized with rules that specify when to take snapshots, how many snapshots to take, and how long to keep each snapshot. Compliance requirements can also be specified to send alerts if the rules of a policy are not being met. Applications can be protected by multiple policies with differing schedules and retention parameters according to the requirements of the business. Each policy can protect many applications, even protecting a mix of open systems and mainframe applications.
Snapshot policies provide reliable protection for applications in an automated fashion that requires little to no maintenance by the business. Administrators can manually take snapshots of applications that are protected by snapshot policies to satisfy on-demand requirements