Clone and attach a vDisk

The clone and attach vDisk feature in ThinkAgile CP enables IT administrators to support data protection and availability use cases directly within ThinkAgile CP, all from a single golden copy of your production data.

There are countless situations in which it is useful to create copies of your production data: to perform tasks such as malware analysis, application development and testing (dev/test), user acceptance testing (UAT), analytics, data protection, archiving and provisioning of new instances. It is not uncommon to see 7-10 copies of production data in enterprises today. Unfortunately, traditional copies do not come for free. They consume significant storage, server and network resources, and valuable administrator time and energy. As a result, many IT shops make do with fewer, and less up-to-date copies than they really need. The problem is so significant that entire companies have been created to attack this problem of copy data management.

Within ThinkAgile CP, application-consistent clones can be created in seconds, are space efficient and available for quick access while also being deduplicated and compressed for backup or long-term retention. Clones allow you to access a single, point-in-time copy of your primary data. The clone and attach function allows that copy to be attached immediately to a new application instance that needs that copy.

For instructions on how to clone and attach a vDisk in the ThinkAgile CP Cloud Controller, see the following topic:

Clone and attach a vDisk

• Understanding Clone Operation Benefits
  Cloning provides several benefits.
• How cloning and attaching a vDisk works in ThinkAgile CP
  Disk clones have all of the capabilities of any other disk, including the ability to be resized, to be deduplicated and compressed, to be the source of a backup, or to be cloned. The technology that makes this all possible is integral to how ThinkAgile CP manages storage.