1 Understanding and planning Remote Copy
Remote Copy provides a powerful and flexible method for reproducing data and keeping that replicated
data available for disaster recovery, business continuance, backup and recovery, data migration,
and data mining.
How Remote Copy works
Remote Copy uses the existing volume and snapshot features with replication across geographic
distances to create remote snapshots. The geographic distance can be local (in the same data center
or on the same campus), metro (in the same city), or long distance (cross-country, global).
For example, the accounting department in the corporate headquarters in Chicago runs the corporate
accounting application and stores the resulting data. The designated backup site is in Detroit. Nightly
at 11:00 p.m., accounting updates are copied to the Detroit backup facility using Remote Copy.
Figure 1
on page 9 shows the basic flow of Remote Copy.
Reproducing data using Remote Copy follows a three-step process:
1.
At the production location, create a snapshot of the primary volume. This is called the primary
snapshot.
2.
Create a remote volume at the remote location, and then create a remote copy of the primary
snapshot to the remote volume.
The system copies data from the primary snapshot to the remote snapshot.
Figure 1 Basic flow of Remote Copy
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P4000 Remote Copy user guide
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