Dell EMC Powerstore: Snapshots and Thin Clones
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Technical White Paper Dell EMC PowerStore: Snapshots and Thin Clones Abstract This white paper provides an overview of the snapshot and thin clone features of Dell EMC™ PowerStore™, including information about the underlying structures and management methods. June 2021 H18156.3 Revisions Revisions Date Description April 2020 Initial release: PowerStoreOS 1.0 May 2020 Minor updates April 2021 Minor updates: PowerStoreOS 2.0 June 2021 Minor updates Acknowledgments Author: Ryan Poulin Updated: Ethan Stokes The information in this publication is provided “as is.” Dell Inc. makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Use, copying, and distribution of any software described in this publication requires an applicable software license. 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[6/7/2021] [Technical White Paper] [H18156.3] 2 Dell EMC PowerStore: Snapshots and Thin Clones | H18156.3 Table of contents Table of contents Revisions............................................................................................................................................................................. 2 Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................................................... 2 Table of contents ................................................................................................................................................................ 3 Executive summary ............................................................................................................................................................. 4 Audience ............................................................................................................................................................................. 4 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................... 5 1.1 Snapshots overview ........................................................................................................................................... 5 1.2 Redirect-on-write technology .............................................................................................................................. 6 1.3 Terminology ........................................................................................................................................................ 6 2 Snapshot operations .................................................................................................................................................... 8 2.1 Create ................................................................................................................................................................. 8 2.2 Modify ............................................................................................................................................................... 11 2.3 Delete ............................................................................................................................................................... 12 2.4 Refresh ............................................................................................................................................................. 12 2.4.1 Volumes and volume groups ............................................................................................................................ 12 2.4.2 File systems ...................................................................................................................................................... 16 2.5 Restore ............................................................................................................................................................. 17 3 Snapshot access ........................................................................................................................................................ 20 4 Snapshot aging........................................................................................................................................................... 24 5 Snapshot properties ................................................................................................................................................... 25 6 Snapshot rules............................................................................................................................................................ 27 7 Snapshot interoperability ............................................................................................................................................ 33 7.1 AppSync ........................................................................................................................................................... 33 7.2 Data reduction .................................................................................................................................................. 33 7.3 Migration: Internal migrations ........................................................................................................................... 34 7.4 Replication ........................................................................................................................................................ 34 7.5 Volume groups .................................................................................................................................................. 34 7.6 VMware ............................................................................................................................................................. 35 8 Thin clone overview .................................................................................................................................................... 36 9 Thin clone operations ................................................................................................................................................. 38 9.1 Create ............................................................................................................................................................... 38 9.2 Refresh ............................................................................................................................................................. 40 10 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................................. 44 A Technical support and resources ............................................................................................................................... 45 3 Dell EMC PowerStore: Snapshots and Thin Clones | H18156.3 Executive summary Executive summary As data becomes increasingly important to organizations of all types, these organizations continually strive to find the safest and most effective ways to protect their data. While many methods of data protection exist, one of the simplest and most-effective methods involves using snapshots. Snapshots allow recovery of data by rolling back to an older point-in-time or copying select data from the snapshot. Snapshots continue to be an essential data-protection mechanism that is used across a wide variety of industries and use cases. Snapshots can preserve the most important mission-critical production data, sometimes with other data- protection technologies. Dell EMC™ PowerStore™ provides a simple but powerful approach to local data protection using snapshots. PowerStore uses the same snapshot technology across all the resources within the system, including volumes, volume groups, file systems, virtual machines, and thin clones. Snapshots use thin, redirect-on-write technology to ensure that system space is used optimally and reduces the management burden by never requiring administrators to designate protection space. Snapshots can be created manually through PowerStore Manager, PowerStore CLI, REST API, or automatically using protection policies. Protection policies can be created and assigned to quickly create local and remote protection on supported resources. A thin clone is a read/write copy of a volume, volume group, or file system. Thin clones use the same underlying pointer-based technology that snapshots use to create multiple copies of storage resources. Thin clones support many data services, which engineers and developers can leverage in their environments. When users create a thin clone, it acts as a regular resource and is listed with the other resources of the system. Like snapshots, users can create,