Business continuance volume
{{Short description|EMC Corporation's term for redundant copies of data in a disk array}}
{{Notability|date=December 2024}}
In disk arrays, a business continuance volume (BCV) is EMC Corporation's term for an independently addressable copy of a data volume, that uses advanced mirroring technique for business continuity purposes.{{cite web |url=http://www.drj.com/articles/Win98/ogor.htm |title=Disaster Recovery Journal | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090814163434/http://www.drj.com/articles/Win98/ogor.htm |archive-date=2009-08-14 |access-date=2012-03-01}}
Use
BCVs can be detached from the active data storage at a point in time and mounted on non-critical servers to facilitate offline backup or parallel computing.{{citation needed|date=November 2007}} Once offline processes are completed, these BCVs can be either:
- discarded
- used as a source to recover the production data
- re-attached (re-synchronized) to the production data again
Types
There are two types of BCVs:
- A clone BCV is a traditional method, and uses one-to-one separate physical storage (splitable disk mirror)
- least impact on production performance
- high cost of the additional storage
- persistent usage
- A snapshot BCV, that uses copy on write algorithm on the production volume
- uses only a small additional storage, that only holds the changes made to the production volume
- lower cost of the additional storage
- reads and writes impact performance of production storage
- once snapshot storage fills up, the snapshot becomes invalid and unusable
- short-term usage