Snapshots
Space Saving Snapshots for Quick Recovery
Permabit’s built–in Snapshot technology enables fast and efficient point–in–time views of data. Snapshots of a volume can either be created automatically at scheduled intervals or triggered manually by an administrator. Permabit snapshots can be used to access information that may have been inadvertently deleted from an active Permabit volume.
It is simple to use snapshots for versioning to support compliance needs (to prove the state of data at a specific point in time), and as a fast and efficient data restoration mechanism for recovering inadvertently deleted information.
Permabit snapshots provide two levels of space savings. When a snapshot is taken, it initially uses almost no additional space (less than one kilobyte) because conventional copy–on–write techniques allow both the snapshot and the active read/write volume to reference the same data segments stored in the grid. As the volume changes a snapshot may consume more space, but only as files are deleted or modified.
Permabit’s advanced data deduplication technology, Scalable Data Reduction™ (SDR) also reduces snapshot storage requirements by allowing data deduplication not just against previous versions of the same file, but also against any other data in the system. If a snapshot is taken and a file contained within that snapshot is copied to a different volume in the system, no additional space is consumed. No other vendor provides this level of flexibility.
SDR makes Permabit snapshots extremely lightweight in terms of performance and space requirements. Large numbers of snapshots do not slow down Permabit systems avoiding the 255 snapshot restriction seen with traditional snapshot implementations. Permabit can support thousands of snapshots. Direct integration between snapshot and deduplication technologies enables Permabit storage to seamlessly address key archive requirements in large enterprise environments.
Permabit Features:
Figure 1. Built–in snapshot capabilities allow a virtually unlimited number of snapshots over time.
- Built–in: Snapshots are a standard feature of Permabit Enterprise Archive. There are no additional licenses, software, or hardware to purchase.
- Copy–on–Write: Only deleted or modified files are stored reducing size of snapshots.
- Space Saving: Snapshots leverage Scalable Data Reduction (SDR) for advanced data deduplication, dramatically reducing the total storage footprint required.
- Scalable: Thousands of snapshots are supported for each volume.
- WORM: Snapshots of Read/Write volumes can be taken as WORM volumes preserving data integrity for compliance or legal discovery needs.
- Scheduled or Ad Hoc: Snapshots can be scheduled to be taken at regular intervals or an ad hoc basis.
Key Benefits
- Rollback to previous points in time providing an additional layer of data protection.
- Point–in–time views for compliance or eDiscovery needs delivering reference data and discovery data quickly and easily.
- Compliance ready snapshots can be taken from Read/Write or WORM volumes preserving data integrity for eDiscovery purposes.
- Minimal footprint needed due to copy–on–write technology combined with SDR.
- Thousands of Snapshots are supported allowing for many point–in–time views of data.
The Permabit Advantage
| The Permabit Way | The Other Way |
|---|---|
| Copy–on–Write with SDR — Supports thousands of Snapshots. | Limited Number of Snapshots — Performance and scalability limit number of snapshots to 255. |
| Read/Write or WORM — Snapshots can be taken as Read/Write or WORM volumes within the same system. | Read/Write Snapshots — Cannot take mixed Read/Write and WORM snapshots within a single solution. |