IBM DS4100 Flashcopy Activation

Specifications

This point-in-time logical drive image appears and functions as a standard logical drive that can be read from, or written to, and is mappable to any host. The FlashCopy feature enables host servers to access an up-to-date copy of production data for a variety of applications including backup, application testing or development, information analysis or data mining, while the production data remains online and user-accessible. The image can also be used for fast file restoration, saving the time and expense of going to a tape archive. The FlashCopy feature creates a point-in-time (PiT) image of a volume the equivalent of a complete physical copy but created much more quickly and requiring less disk space. FlashCopy volumes are host-addressable and function as normal volumes with complete read and write access. The FlashCopy feature uses an innovative copy-on-write technology to maintain the logical FlashCopy volume while reducing disk utilization. A repository volume stores only the data blocks that have changed since the time of the last use of the FlashCopy feature.