Business continuance volume

In disk arrays, a business continuance volume, or BCV, is EMC Corporation's term for an independently addressable copy of a data volume, that uses advanced mirroring technique for business continuity purposes.^[1]

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

• discarded
• re-attached (re-synchronized) to the production data again
• used as a source to recover the production data

Types

There are two types of BCVs:

• A clone BCV is a traditional method, and uses one-to-one separate physical storage (splitable disk mirror)
  • 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

References