Building New Storage Applications beyond BC/DR with Copy-on-Write Snapshot File System

Backup, Restore and Disaster Recovery are usually tedious IT Operations with slow tape devices; but, as Mr. Backup described in his blog post "Can you have a backup system based solely on snapshots and replication?", the new Copy-on-Write Snapshot File Systems, such as NetApp Data ONTAP and Solaris ZFS, will enable us to develop a new type of Storage Application to support fast backup, restore and recovery.

A Snapshot based Data Protection System usually takes snapshot copies of a production system periodically to protect data loss and corruption, and snapshot copies can be replicated to a remote system for BC/DR. There are several advantages using snapshots : fastest recovery since there is no data conversion, space saving since only the data changes are stored in incremental snapshots, and easy to use.

Using Snapshot Data Protection System, we can start to build new Storage Applications beyond BC/DR:

1. Managing Snapshots across local and remote storage systems, including scheduling, retention, history, monitoring and reporting

2. Integrate Snapshots with Business Applications, this combined with a snapshot manager will enable us to build a type of always-available storage application.

For example, in his post "Creating database clones with ZFS really FAST", Ronny Egners demonstrated that how easy to create a clone Oracle Database Instance when original Database Instance is running on ZFS; if you apply this idea to run Oracle Stand-by Database on ZFS, you can easily start a cloned Stand-by Oracle Database doing reports in the meantime the original database would keep itself in Stand-by mode with no disruption.

Updated on Oct 10: You can find Oracle Database Cloning Solution Using Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliance And Oracle Data Guard Technical White Paper from Oracle MAA Best Practices web site, also Oracle Fusion Middleware Disaster Recovery Solution using Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliance.