Applications of SnapMirror

SnapMirror is used to replicate data. Its qualities make SnapMirror useful in several scenarios, including disaster recovery, data backup, and data restoration.

You can copy or use the data stored on a SnapMirror destination. The additional advantages of SnapMirror make it useful in data retrieval situations such as those described in the following table:

Situation	How to use SnapMirror
Disaster recovery: You want to provide immediate access to data after a disaster has made a qtree, volume, or system unavailable.	You can make the destination writable so clients can use the same data that was on the source volume the last time data was copied.
Disaster recovery testing: You want to test the recovery of data and restoration of services in the event of a disaster.	You can use FlexClone technology on the SnapMirror destination, and test for disaster recovery, without stopping or pausing other replication operations.
Data restoration: You want to restore lost data on a qtree or volume source from its mirrored qtree or volume SnapMirror partner.	You can temporarily reverse the roles for the source and destination qtrees or volumes and copy the mirrored information back to its source.
Application testing: You want to use an application on a database, but you want to test it on a copy of the database in case the application damages the data.	You can make a copy of the database to be used in the application testing to ensure that the data on the source cannot be lost.
Load balancing: A large number of users need read-only access to a qtree or volume.	You can copy the data in a qtree or volume to multiple volumes or systems to distribute the load.
Off-loading tape backups: You need to reserve all processing and networking resources on a system for serving NFS and CIFS requests.	After copying data on the source system, you can back up the data in the destination to tape. This means that the source system does not have to allocate resources for performing backups.
Access to remote data: Users who need read access to a volume are distributed over a large geographical area.	You can copy the source volume to other systems that are geographically closer to the users. Users accessing a local system can read the data using less resource time than if they connected to a distant system.