What are you snapshot policies?

[Paul Hutchings]

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.

[Paul Hutchings]

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?

[teledata · Accepted solution]

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.

[Steve Burkett]

Hey Teledata, which third party offering is this then?

[Paul Hutchings]

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".

[Paul Hutchings]

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?