Home > Workload Solutions > Oracle > White Papers > Dell PowerMax 2500 and 8500 Best Practices for Mission Critical Oracle Databases > Local replications using snapshots
TimeFinder software on PowerMax 2500 and PowerMax 8500 storage systems protects applications through two complementary products: TimeFinder/SnapVX (snapshots) and TimeFinder/Clone (clones). Choosing between snapshots or clones depends on the use case. Both snapshots and clones can be created using the Solutions Enabler command-line interface (CLI), REST APIs, or with Unisphere.
Snapshots are always associated with their source volumes and cannot be directly accessed. Instead, as shown in Figure 11, snapshots can either be restored to their source volumes or linked to a set of matching target volumes. These volumes are then referred to as linked target volumes, which can be made visible to a host so that the snapshot data can be accessed. However, it is not possible to restore the linked target volumes directly. Instead, a new snapshot is created from the linked target volumes and linked back to the original source volumes.
Snapshots also have user-friendly names and versions (also known as generations). In addition, snapshots can be automated with snapshot policies, contain automatic expiration, and can be secured so they cannot be deleted before expiration. Moreover, snapshots are natively consistent.
There are two ways of creating snapshots: manually (including scheduled snapshots) and automatically (using snapshot policies). A source volume can have up to 256 manual snapshots or up to 1,024 automated snapshots. Regardless of how a snapshot was created, it can be linked to up to 1,024 target volumes, allowing high scalability and flexibility of local replication.