Business continuance volume

In disk arrays, a business continuance volume is EMC Corporation's term for an independently addressable copy of a data volume, that uses advanced mirroring technique for business continuity purposes.

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. Once offline processes are completed, these BCVs can be either:

discarded
used as a source to recover the production data
re-attached 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
* 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