For the love of snapshots

Snapshot technology is an alternative to backup that was first made popular by NetApp in their storage systems. Snapshots are a system of pointers to internal storage locations that maintain access to older versions of data. Snapshots are commonly described as making point-in-time copies of data. With snapshots, storage administrators are able to recreate data as it existed at various times in the past.

Snapshot technology is widely appreciated by IT teams everywhere for having saved them innumerable hours that they would have spent restoring data from backup tapes. It’s no wonder that snapshot technology has become a key element of storage infrastructures and is one of the most heavily utilized features on most business-class storage systems.

While IT teams have largely replaced backups with snapshots for restoring historical versions of data, the two technologies are often used together in backup scenarios. Snapshots are used to capture updates to data and then backup processes capture the data from the snapshot. This keeps backups from interfering with active production applications and their data.

One problem with snapshots is that they consume additional storage capacity on primary storage that has to be planned for. The amount of snapshot data depends on the breadth of changed data and the frequency of snapshots. As data growth consumes more and more capacity the amount of snapshot data also tends to increase and IT teams may be surprised to discover they are running out of primary storage capacity. A remedy for this is deleting snapshot data, but that means fewer versions of data are available to restore than expected.

In many cases, that may not be a huge problem, but there could be times when not being able to restore previous versions of data could cause problems for the IT team. Otherwise, the ease that snapshot capacity can be returned to free space depends on the storage system and may not be as simple as expected.

Source of Information : Rethinking Enterprise Storage