About business copy

[expertone]

Can any body tell me what is business copy and how to create it , split it. and also provide me any documents related to it.

[Matti_Kurkela]

Is Google broken for you?

My first two hits when searching on "business copy":

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storage/software/bizcopyeva/index.html

HP Business Copy for EVA storage

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storage/software/xpbusscopy/index.html

HP Business Copy for XP storage

In other words, this is a feature of a storage system. To set it up, contact your storage administrator: s/he should perform the initial set-up and provide you with the tools and passwords needed to send the Business Copy Volume operation commands to the storage system, so that you can integrate those commands to your backup processes (or whatever you need the BCV for).

There are basically two modes for Business Copy: a full-volume Business Copy tells the storage system to effectively maintain an extra RAID1 mirror for the LUN(s) required, so that the extra mirror can be split of from the main RAID set at moment's notice and presented to a server separately, as a copy of the data of the main RAID set as it existed at the time of the split. This obviously needs as much space as the main LUN(s) the BCV is based off of, and may take a long time to initially sync, but has no other limitations.

A snapshot-type BCV uses a Copy-on-Write buffer to achieve a similar effect as a full-volume Business Copy, while using only a fraction of the disk space. The limitation is the life-time of the snapshot BCV: once the BCV is split off, the Copy-on-Write buffer is accumulating a list of all the changes on the main LUN(s) since the split. When reading the BCV, any unchanged data blocks are actually read from the main LUN(s); if the block has changed on the main LUN(s) since the split, a copy of the old data is read from the Copy-on-Write buffer instead.

Once the Copy-on-Write buffer becomes full, the snapshot must die as it can no longer track the changes on the main LUN(s). The storage administrator can choose the size of the Copy-on-Write buffer when setting up a snapshot-type BCV according to your requirements.