Business Continuance Volume

In disk arrays, a Business Continuance Volume, or BCV, is EMC Corporation's term for an independently addressable copy of data volume, that uses advanced mirroring technique for business continuity purposes. [ [http://www.drj.com/articles/Win98/ogor.htm Disaster Recovery Journal] ]

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 processing. Once offline processes are completed, these BCVs can be either:
* discarded
* re-attached (re-synchronized) to the production data again
* used as a source to recover the production data

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 (100%)
** 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

References