HP LeftHand P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance Software - Manual (Page 5)

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.
“Basic flow of Remote Copy” (page 5) 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
NOTE: Both primary and completed remote snapshots are the same as regular snapshots.
Remote Copy can be used on the same site, even in the same management group and cluster.
Graphical representations of Remote Copy
The HP StorageWorks P4000 Centralized Management Console displays special graphical
representations of Remote Copy.
How Remote Copy works 5