NetApp Snapshot Technology

NetApp Snapshot Technology Offers Unique Benefits Snapshot technology is available from a variety of data storage vendors, but not all snapshots are created equal. Network Appliance, the first company to ship high-volume, open systems and "point-in-time" Snapshot capability, offers unique and important advantages. NetApp Snapshot technology delivers more stability, scalability, recoverability, and performance than competing snapshots. NetApp has leveraged its superior Snapshot technology as a foundation for developing a family of data protection solutions; these products incorporate and extend the advantages of Snapshot to deliver enterprise data protection. For more information, see the Snapshot datasheet (PDF).

What Is a NetApp Snapshot Copy?
A snapshot is a locally retained point-in-time image of data. NetApp Snapshot technology is a feature of the WAFL® (Write Anywhere File Layout) storage virtualization technology that is a part Data ONTAP®, the microkernel that ships with every NetApp storage system. A NetApp Snapshot is a "frozen," read-only view of a WAFL volume that provides easy access to old versions of files, directory hierarchies, and/or LUNs (logical unit numbers).

The high performance of NetApp Snapshot also makes it highly scalable. A NetApp Snapshot takes only a few seconds to createâ€"typically less than one second, regardless of the size of the volume or the level of activity on the NetApp storage system. After a Snapshot copy has been created, changes to data objects are reflected in updates to the current version of the objects, as if Snapshot copies did not exist. Meanwhile, the Snapshot version of the data remains completely stable. A NetApp Snapshot incurs no performance overhead; users can comfortably store up to 255 Snapshot copies per WAFL volume, all of which are accessible as read-only and online versions of the data.

What Users and Administrators Do with Snapshot Copies System administrators use Snapshot copies to facilitate frequent, low-impact, user-recoverable backups of files, directory hierarchies, LUNs, and/or application data. Snapshot copies vastly improve the frequency and reliability of backups, since they incur minimal performance overhead and can be safely created on a running system.

Snapshot copies provide near-instantaneous, secure, user-managed restores. Users can directly access Snapshot copies to recover from accidental deletions, corruptions, or modifications of their data. Since the security of the file is retained in the Snapshot copy, the restoration is both secure and simple.

Snapshot Technology Unifies NetApp Data Protection Solutions Snapshot functionality is at the core technology of all NetApp data protection solutions, so each solution has inherited Snapshot technology's unique advantages. SnapMirror®, SnapRestore®, SnapManager®, and SnapVaultâ„¢ offer enterprises stability, performance, storage efficiency, functionality, and interoperability that competing solutionsâ€"not based on NetApp Snapshot technologyâ€"simply cannot match.