Home > Workload Solutions > Oracle > Guides > Design Guide—Oracle RAC Database on PowerStore T Storage > Introduction
PowerStore storage arrays enable you to create snapshots of storage volumes. These snapshots provide point-in-time copies of the data that is stored in the volumes and can be used as a local data protection solution within a PowerStore system. Snapshots are not a full copy of the volumes. Instead, they consist of pointers to the data blocks and use redirect-on-write technology. Accordingly, snapshots are space-efficient and do not consume any extra space until either the new data is written to the thin clone that is created from them or new data is written to the source database.
Hosts cannot access snapshots unless a thin clone is created from the snapshot and presented to the host.
As shown in the following figure, we took a snapshot of the PROD database, created a thin clone of the snapshot, and finally mounted the thin clone to the DEV environment as the DEV database: