Planning Considerations

Before using Database FlashSnap, you must first determine your intended application. You will then need to make the following decisions:

• Which snapshot mode is appropriate: online, offline, or instant?
• Will you need one or two hosts?

Selecting the Snapshot Mode

If your purpose is to use the snapshot for backup or to recover the database after logical errors have occurred, choose the online option. In the event that your production database is offline, choose offline. If you intend to use the snapshot for decision-support analysis, reporting, development, or testing, choose instant. An instant snapshot is not suitable for recovery because it is not necessarily an exact copy of the primary database.

Selecting One or Two Hosts

If maintaining the performance of your primary database is critical, you can offload processing of the snapshots to a secondary host. For off-host processing, storage must be shared between the primary and secondary hosts.

If cost savings is most important, you can choose to do the processing on the same host as the primary database to save on hardware costs.