Business continuance volume
In disk arrays, a business continuance volume, or BCV, is EMC Corporation's term for an independently addressable copy of a data volume, that uses advanced mirroring technique for business continuity purposes.Use
BCVs can be detached from the active data storage at a point in time and mounted on non-critical servers to facilitate offline backup or parallel processing. Once offline processes are completed, these BCVs can be either:
- discarded
- re-attached to the production data again
- used as a source to recover the production data
Types
There are two types of BCVs:
- A clone BCV is a traditional method, and uses one-to-one separate physical storage
- * least impact on production performance
- * high cost of the additional storage
- * persistent usage
- A snapshot BCV, that uses copy on write algorithm on the production volume
- * uses only a small additional storage, that only holds the changes made to the production volume
- ** lower cost of the additional storage
- ** reads and writes impact performance of production storage
- * once snapshot storage fills up, the snapshot becomes invalid and unusable
- * short-term usage
