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PowerStore provides Hyper-V administrators with many options for protecting, moving, archiving, and recovering data to protect against or recover from many DR and disaster-avoidance scenarios. In addition to the integrated redundancies with PowerStore architecture, administrators can use snapshots, thin clones, and replication in many creative ways to ensure business continuity.
Disaster recovery usually means to react to an event that causes downtime that takes place unexpectedly with little or no warning. These events can be categorized as follows:
Disaster avoidance implies having enough lead time to proactively react to an impending event, such as a planned power outage, to avoid or minimize downtime. This strategy is commonly used when performing routine system maintenance with PowerStore, such as a PowerStoreOS upgrade. With disaster avoidance, often there is time to react in a predictable and methodical way to avoid or minimize downtime. For example, an administrator might move a critical workload to another PowerStore appliance within a multiappliance cluster using integrated nondisruptive storage migration tools in PowerStore Manager. Data and workloads can be moved to an alternate location using PowerStore replication, before planned site maintenance at the main location causes an outage there.
A good business continuity plan includes both disaster recovery and disaster avoidance strategies. These strategies should use a combination of manual and automatic processes to address the widest possible range of scenarios that is feasible within the budget.