Business continuance volume

EMC Corporation's term for redundant copies of data in a disk array

In disk arrays, a business continuance volume (BCV) is EMC Corporation's term for an independently addressable copy of a data volume, that uses advanced mirroring technique for business continuity purposes.^[1]

Use

BCVs can be detached from the active data storage at a point in time and mounted on non-critical servers to facilitate offline backup or parallel computing.^{[citation needed]} Once offline processes are completed, these BCVs can be either:

discarded
used as a source to recover the production data
re-attached (re-synchronized) to the production data again

Types

There are two types of BCVs:

A clone BCV is a traditional method, and uses one-to-one separate physical storage (splitable disk mirror)
- least impact on production performance
- high cost of the additional storage
- persistent usage

A snapshot BCV, that uses copy on write algorithm on the production volume
- uses only a small additional storage, that only holds the changes made to the production volume
  - lower cost of the additional storage
  - reads and writes impact performance of production storage
- once snapshot storage fills up, the snapshot becomes invalid and unusable
- short-term usage