Using SnapVault on a SnapMirror Destination

[jamie_rowe]

Hi guys,

Probably asked a thousand times before but I've read many of the responses and to be honest it's not written in a way I can understand or relevant to the solution I am looking a so figured I would ask again for those in the cheap seats.

Firstly a bit of background, We have a primary site which SnapMirrors all of it's volumes to a SnapMirror DR site.  At the primary site we take snapshots every day and keep 7 days worth of snapshots locally.  So at any one time any volume at the primary site has 7 snapshots (Done via SMVI/SMSQL etc) these are replicated hourly to our SnapMirror DR volumes.  Great.  Any issues and we can use these to recover the volume.

Now what I would like to do is use SnapVault to backup these SnapShots so we can recover a volume from a further point in time.  I.e. 30 days previously.

What I am struggling with is how this would work.  At the moment I have the following in my head.

1) Primary storage replicates to DR storage via SnapMirror (Consistent SnapShots etc)

2) DR storage (SnapMirror volume) has SnapVault ran against it (SnapVault treats this as the primary volume) and this is then backed off to another volume on the DR storage for SnapVault (So now I have two volumes per one primary storage volume, a SnapVault volume and a SnapMirror volume).

But now I have the following questions:

1) I need to do a recovery of a volume from 30 days previously.  How do I do this in theory? I assumed I would sync the SnapVault SnapShot I required back to the SnapMirror volume and work from the SnapMirror Volume (I.e. Recover the individual files or sync this SnapMirror volume back towards the primary storage if required)

2) I assume there is no way around the required of having two volumes in order to provide this level of protection?

Cheers in advance,

- Jamie

[rshiva]

Hi,

I'm not sure whether you've tried this - but I guess it's worth asking - Have you tried using Protection Manager's cascaded protection policy: Mirror then backup? We can create a dataset with this policy, try importing a snapmirror relationship, once done - the conformance engine should automaticaly provision a snapvault destination to the snapmirror destination. You can configure the policy to set the appropriate data transfer schedule from snapmirror destination to the snapvault destination and also specify the retention time on the snapvault destination.

I haven't tested importing a snapmirror relationship to a dataset with a cascaded policy - Let me know if you're intrested

Thanks and regards

Shiva Raja

[andrew_nomura]

1. If you want to resotre the data over or 30 dyas rfom SV destination, then simple map to the volume and go to snapshot (either  CIFS/NFS) and you will find list of snapshots with the timestemp on.

Go to that SS and copy and paste to restore volume /qtree you desinate.

2. I do not understand why you need to have 2 set of volume for restoration.  After 30 days, both PROD and DR volumes would not have the SS that you might need the data restored from.

Hope this would help.