Data protection methods in SAN environments overview
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You can protect your data by making copies of it so that it is available for restoration in the event of accidental deletion, application crashes, data corruption, or disaster. Depending on your data protection and backup needs, ONTAP offers a variety of methods that enable you to protect your data.
SnapMirror active sync
Beginning with general availability in ONTAP 9.9.1, provides Zero Recovery Time Objective (Zero RTO) or Transparent Application Failover (TAF) to enable automatic failover of business-critical applications in SAN environments. SnapMirror active sync requires the installation of ONTAP Mediator 1.2 in a configuration with either two AFF clusters or two All-Flash SAN Array (ASA) clusters.
Snapshot copy
Enables you to manually or automatically create, schedule, and maintain multiple backups of your LUNs. Snapshot copies use only a minimal amount of additional volume space and do not have a performance cost. If your LUN data is accidentally modified or deleted, that data can easily and quickly be restored from one of the latest Snapshot copies.
FlexClone LUNs (FlexClone license required)
Provides point-in-time, writable copies of another LUN in an active volume or in a Snapshot copy. A clone and its parent can be modified independently without affecting each other.
SnapRestore (license required)
Enables you to perform fast, space-efficient, on-request data recovery from Snapshot copies on an entire volume. You can use SnapRestore to restore a LUN to an earlier preserved state without rebooting the storage system.
Data protection mirror copies (SnapMirror license required)
Provides asynchronous disaster recovery by enabling you to periodically create Snapshot copies of data on your volume; copy those Snapshot copies over a local or wide area network to a partner volume, usually on another cluster; and retain those Snapshot copies. The mirror copy on the partner volume provides quick availability and restoration of data from the time of the last Snapshot copy, if the data on the source volume is corrupted or lost.
SnapVault backups (SnapMirror license required)
Provides storage efficient and long-term retention of backups. SnapVault relationships enable you to back up selected Snapshot copies of volumes to a destination volume and retain the backups.
If you conduct tape backups and archival operations, you can perform them on the data that is already backed up on the SnapVault secondary volume.
SnapDrive for Windows or UNIX (SnapDrive license required)
Configures access to LUNs, manages LUNs, and manages storage system Snapshot copies directly from a Windows or UNIX hosts.
Native tape backup and recovery
Support for most existing tape drives are included in ONTAP, as well as a method for tape vendors to dynamically add support for new devices. ONTAP also supports the Remote Magnetic Tape (RMT) protocol, enabling backup and recovery to any capable system.