It is commonplace in computer storage products to create multiple “snapshots” of the stored data. Snapshots are point-in-time representations of the data that is stored on a storage device. It is also commonplace that data sets are replicated to another storage device for disaster recovery, backup, etc. There are various ways to replicate the data using hardware, software, or a combination of both.
While it is common to duplicate data from one computer system to another, it is less common to replicate snapshots of the data from one computer system to another due to data set size or other factors. This is particularly problematic when replication is performed over a relatively slow network connection, such as a wide area network (WAN).
Instead, expensive hardware solutions may be implemented, such as, e.g., Fibre Channel (FC) transaction mirroring, dedicated storage area network (SAN) traffic mirroring, dedicated storage system hardware, etc. Some hardware systems perform duplicate write operations on two sets of storage arrays before acknowledging back to the computer that the file operation has completed. FC solutions utilize dedicated hardware to duplicate the input/output (I/O) traffic on two or more separate SANs to duplicate the data I/O. Software solutions may also be implemented for replicating the entire contents of snapshots, but do not replicate the snapshot space and bandwidth efficiently to the replication target with respect to the replicated base image.