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Replication

Traditionally, ONTAP replication technologies served the need for disaster recovery (DR) and data archiving. With the advent of cloud services, ONTAP replication has been adapted to data transfer between endpoints in the Lenovo data fabric. The foundation for all these uses is ONTAP Snapshot technology.

  • Snapshot copies
    A Snapshot copy is a read-only, point-in-time image of a volume. The image consumes minimal storage space and incurs negligible performance overhead because it records only changes to files since the last Snapshot copy was made.
  • SnapMirror disaster recovery and data transfer
    SnapMirror is disaster recovery technology, designed for failover from primary storage to secondary storage at a geographically remote site. As its name implies, SnapMirror creates a replica, or mirror, of your working data in secondary storage from which you can continue to serve data in the event of a catastrophe at the primary site.
  • SnapVault archiving
    Beginning with ONTAP 9.4, the SnapMirror license is used to support both SnapVault relationships for backup, and SnapMirror relationships for disaster recovery. SnapVault licenses were deprecated, and SnapMirror licenses can be used to configure vault, mirror, and mirror-and-vault relationships. SnapMirror replication is used for ONTAP-to-ONTAP replication of Snapshot copies, supporting both backup and disaster recovery use cases.
  • Support for traditional backups
    In addition to SnapMirror and SnapVault data protection relationships, which were previously disk-to-disk only, there are now several backup solutions that offer a less expensive alternative for long-term data retention.
  • MetroCluster continuous availability
    MetroCluster configurations protect data by implementing two physically separate, mirrored clusters. Each cluster synchronously replicates the data and SVM configuration of the other. In the event of a disaster at one site, an administrator can activate the mirrored SVM and begin serving data from the surviving site.