Beginning with PowerStoreOS 3.5, crash-consistent backups of volumes and volume groups can be taken directly to a PowerProtect DD series appliance. Using PowerStore snapshot technology, a snapshot of the volume or volume group is created and then copied to a PowerProtect DD appliance. These backups can be initiated from PowerStore Manager or PowerProtect Data Manager. This backup method can be used to augment application-consistent data protection workflows and offers several interesting advantages:
- Near-instant backups, regardless of the database size. PowerStore snapshot technology is a metadata operation that creates a recovery point, typically in less than a second. On large databases, this can expedite backup and recovery workflows by hours.
- Efficient, low impact, off-array protection. Reading directly from snapshots and writing directly to PowerProtect DD series appliances is a more efficient backup approach than writing backups to disk and then writing them to a backup appliance.
- Backup recovery directly to a PowerStore snapshot. Once a remote backup is retrieved from PowerProtect, it is written as a PowerStore snapshot. This immediately provides all the efficiency and flexibility of PowerStore snapshots such as Thin Clone, Restore, and Refresh operations.
- No backup software or backup host requirement. Backup and recovery are coordinated directly from PowerStore.