topic Re: What are you snapshot policies? in StoreVirtual Storage

What are you snapshot policies?

Paul Hutchings — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 15:04:12 GMT

I know it will vary depending on churn rate, but with P4000 with volumes that are either vmfs formatted for VM's or NTFS formatted and presented to Windows servers, what kind of snapshot policies are you using please?

I'm looking (aren't we all) to minimize snapshot space used whilst maximizing recovery options.

Re: What are you snapshot policies?

Paul Hutchings — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 18:19:48 GMT

Bump anyone?

I'm also a little unclear of the technology used for P4000 snapshots - does performance degrade the more snapshots (snapshots, NOT smartclones) you take and keep?

Re: What are you snapshot policies?

teledata — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 01:04:26 GMT

This would be a fairly typical setup for a customer setup. Often I will do a group of snapshots (obviously depends on retention and recovery requirements):

every 2 hours (retain 3 local, and 1 remote)
every 1 day (retain 2 local, and 1 remote)
every 1 week (retain 2 local, and 1 remote)

As far as performance impact, it will depend on volume of data changing. Based on your snapshot retention policy it will be deleting your oldest snapshot(s) and "rolling" the changes into the next oldest one which obviously has some I/O cost associated with it, but it depends on how much data you are talking about.

I have been leaning away from using the LeftHand snapshots as the primary data recovery solution and am now adding a 3rd party software solution that runs on Windows and is an integrated backup/recovery/DR solution. It also integrates de-duplication and data compression so it is more efficient to use for backups than native SAN snapshots.

Re: What are you snapshot policies?

Steve Burkett — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 11:06:44 GMT

Hey Teledata, which third party offering is this then?

Re: What are you snapshot policies?

Paul Hutchings — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 13:58:32 GMT

Thanks Teledata.

I've not missed something have I?

There's no way to configure 1 snapshot schedule to do tiered retention?

Seems a bit silly saying "It's midnight on Saturday so 3 schedules fire, take an hourly, take a daily, take a weekly".

Re: What are you snapshot policies?

Paul Hutchings — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 19:48:13 GMT

Also how do you all stagger your snapshots?

Seems easy to just have everything snap on the hour but I assume that can have a negative effect as well?