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Unity can create point-in-time snapshots of one or more volumes. Snapshots are space-efficient because they consist of pointers to frozen data blocks and use redirect-on-write technology. They consume no extra space unless, for example, a thin clone is created from a snapshot and mapped to a host, and new data is written to the thin clone.
Snapshots provide a fast and space-efficient way to protect Oracle databases. When using snapshots with Oracle databases, there are important considerations to ensure a successful database recovery.
Note: Snapshots increase the overall CPU load on the system and increase the overall drive IOPS in the storage pool. Snapshots also use pool capacity to store the older data in the snapshot, which increases the amount of capacity used in the pool until the snapshot is deleted. Consider the overhead of snapshots when planning both performance and capacity requirements for the storage pool.
When recovering the database from a snapshot, the Dell Unity system offers two methods to recover a point-in-time copy of the database: restore and attach to host.