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  5. Commvault Turns Snapshots Into 'Proper' Backups: Page 2 of 2
Data Centers

Commvault Turns Snapshots Into 'Proper' Backups: Page 2 of 2

As we discussed a few weeks ago, you can certainly argue that snapshots, when combined with replication, could serve as an adequate backup system. My biggest objection was that snapshots lack the catalog that conventional backup applications build as they back up data. Commvault's SnapProtect fills that gap by providing catalogs and a management console for snapshots across a variety of arrays and other snapshot providers.
Howard Marks
March 21, 2011

This has most of the advantages of the SCSI block copy LAN-free backups that were pitched as major reason to use a Fibre Channel SAN back in the day, without most of the drawbacks.

For reasons I can't really explain, I am intrigued by the idea that rather than have the data for my server backups come from whenever the backup job for that particular server came up in the backup schedule, I can have all my server backups for the week use the Friday 7 p.m. snapshot data. That way my weekly full backup will reflect my whole data center at a single point in time. I can't come up with a good reason for it, but it just seems cool.

So Commvault's SnapProtect option makes snapshots look like conventional backups and uses snapshots to enable good, LAN-free backups. Looks like the future to me.

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