SnapMirror technology enables customers to copy and backup their production data. The secondary or destination volume in such a backup relationship can reside anywhere, locally or remotely, and can be used to restore access to the protected data. You can restore access to protected data by drawing upon a vault of backups or, in the event that a primary is unusable, by using a disaster recovery copy that can be activated for clients and applications. SnapMirror periodically updates a replica to create new backups and/or to keep a replica up-to-date with changes that have been written to the primary. The SnapMirror subsystems are designed to keep many pairs of source (primary) and destination (secondary) copies up-to-date in an efficient and scalable manner.

The SnapMirror APIs can be used to create and manage SnapMirror relationships of type "async", and "sync". These APIs can also be used to manage restore-relationships. These APIs allow you to manage the following endpoints: