HP 3PAR Virtual Copy Software -
Overview & Features

Overview

HP 3PAR Virtual Copy Software flexibly delivers instant, point-in-time (PIT) copies of your data so you can share and protect data from any application simply and affordably. Use Virtual Copy to stay ahead of the innovation curve-for example, by enabling rapid application recovery-while containing costs with a "thin-aware" implementation that minimizes the amount of physical capacity that is actually being consumed by your data-and without sacrificing performance, availability, or versatility.

Most traditional copy solutions lack flexibility and require too great an investment in online capacity to be considered economical. Virtual Copy Software is a reservationless, non-duplicative, copy-on-write product that consumes capacity only for changed data, in fine-grained increments, and without ever duplicating changed data within a snapshot tree.

What's new

• Configurable priority levels for promote operation enable users to flexibly adapt the speed of rapid application recovery to meet their business requirements
• Increased the number of promotes of Virtual Copy that can be executed in parallel, minimizing recovery time of mission critical applications. (Increased from max of 2 to max of 32 on a 8 node system)

Features

• HP 3PAR Virtual Copy Software you can create up to 500 instantly available point-in-time (PIT) snapshots per base volume without impacting applications, up to 256 of which can be read-write copies.
• Receive autonomic data integrity across a set of volumes by using consistency groups feature to maintain write order consistency within a volume set.
• Automate creation and expiration of virtual copy snapshots using scheduler feature.

• With HP 3PAR Virtual Copy Software reservationless snapshots prevent pre-reservation of capacity. Only fine-grained capacity is consumed for changed data. Copy-on-write operations are thin and non-duplicative; changed data is never duplicated within a snapshot tree.
• Autonomic space reclamation using thin copy reclamation feature frees up unused space following snapshot deletions to maintain high capacity utilization over time.
• Snapshots of snapshots are supported for fast, flexible sharing of data sets without the need for additional base volumes.

• Thin, copy-on-write technology and massive parallelism of the HP 3PAR Virtual Copy Software system architecture protect against any noticeable performance impact while the ability to recover applications from multiple points in time on par with continuous data protection (CDP) solutions.
• Delete snapshots freely without affecting peer snapshots; safely revert a volume to any snapshot while retaining the remainder of snapshot tree in tact.
• Flexibly assign different Quality-of-Service (QoS) levels to snapshots and base volumes.

• HP 3PAR Virtual Copy Software integrated with HP 3PAR Recovery Manager Software delivers affordable rapid application recovery for Oracle® Database, Microsoft SQL Server®, Microsoft® Exchange Server, and VMware vSphere™ environments using an extended library of PIT snapshots.
• Back up volumes from a snapshot image locally or remotely, allowing business-critical applications to continue with little or no performance impact, without extended downtime, and while consuming only minimal additional capacity.
• Use multiple read-write snapshot instances of a "golden image" ( a read-only snapshot of a given operating system or application) for "bare metal" server provisioning and simplified patch management.
• Enable multiple developers and testers to safely perform parallel development and testing of new applications with read-write snapshots of production data to accelerate new projects.
• Accelerate data warehouse creation with instant snapshots of production datasets for use in extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations.