This is from Sachin Chheda, Nimble Storage Product Marketing
This is part one of a two-part blog on snapshots.
In the storage world, snapshots are a point-in-time copy of data. They have been around for some time and are increasingly being used by IT to protect stored data. This post recalls some of the popular Nimble Storage blog posts on snapshots. But before I jump into the list of blogs, let me quickly walk you through the different types of storage-based snapshots, including their attributes.
A snapshot copies the metadata (think index) of the data instead of copying the data itself. This means taking a snapshot is almost always instantaneous. This is one of the primary advantages of storage-based snapshots—they eliminate backup windows. In traditional backup deployments, applications either have to be taken off-line or suffer from degraded performance during backups (which is why traditional backups typically happen during off-peak hours)….
