NetApp Snapmirror And Its Advantages

NetApp® SnapMirror® software has been the preferred technology for replication and disaster recovery in a wide variety of NetApp storage environments for years because of its proven efficiency, simplicity, and modest cost when compared with other DR solutions. Over the years, NetApp has continued to enhance SnapMirror with new features and capabilities to make the product fit an even broader range of requirements and to use network bandwidth even more efficiently.

The use of SnapMirror technology offers significant advantages:

Efficient
Block-level updates reduce network bandwidth and time requirements. Starting with Data ONTAP® 7.3.2, volume SnapMirror also offers native network compression to further reduce bandwidth costs.

Flexible
Data can be replicated between dissimilar NetApp storage systems. One-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, or many-to-many replication topologies are supported with async mode.

More productive
When you use SnapMirror in combination with NetApp FlexClone®, you can use the data stored in your DR environment for dev/test, data mining, or other purposes.

Consistent. Through integration with the NetApp SnapManager® suite, application data can be replicated while making sure of full consistency for quick recovery.

Safe
Your DR plan can be tested without affecting production and ongoing replication so you can test more frequently to make sure there aren’t any surprises should disaster strike. To protect against application data corruption, your DR site can keep multiple Snapshot® copies on hand and quickly and easily restore to a point in time before the data corruption occurred.

There are two operating modes for SnapMirror: volume and qtree. Volume SnapMirror is generally the preferred mode. Because of its relative popularity, much of our development effort, including integration with the SnapManager suite of products, has focused on volume SnapMirror. As a result, volume SnapMirror offers greater flexibility and efficiency. This chapter of Back to Basics explores how volume SnapMirror technology is implemented, the most common use cases, best practices for implementing SnapMirror, and more.