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Dell PowerStore Configuring Volumes

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Thin clones

A thin clone is a read-write copy of a volume, volume group, or snapshot that shares blocks with the parent resource. Data available on the source at the moment of the thin clone creation is immediately available to the thin clone. The thin clone references the source snapshot for this data. However, data resulting from changes to the thin clone after its creation is stored on the thin clone. Changes to the thin clone do not affect the source snapshot.

Advantages of using thin clones

Thin clones allow you to create and manage space-efficient copies of production environments, which is beneficial for the following types of activities:
  • Development and test environments - Thin clones allow development and test personnel to work with real workloads and use all data services associated with production storage resources without interfering with production. They also allow development personnel to promote a test thin clone to production.
  • Parallel processing - Parallel processing applications that span multiple servers can use multiple thin clones of a single production data set to achieve results more quickly.
  • Online backup - You can use thin clones to maintain hot backup copies of production systems. If there is corruption in the production data set, you can immediately resume the read-write workload by using the thin clones.
  • System deployment - You can use thin clones to build and deploy templates for identical or near-identical environments. For example, you can create a test template that is thin cloned as needed for predictable testing.

Thin clone restrictions

The following restrictions apply to thin clones:

  • After you create a thin clone, the source volume, volume group, or snapshot can be deleted.
  • If you move a thin clone, the volume family to which it belongs is also moved.

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