Flash for i product manages, automates, controls and reports all the FlashCopy/SnapShot operations
on your External Storage, from your IBM i LPARs.
With ZERO disruption of your production, you can:
– perform ‘INSTANT COPIES’ of your IBM i production partition
– and execute many operations IN PARALLEL on the ‘Clone’ of your PROD
The clone partition of your PROD can be used for several types of operation such as:
Example : Users and programs remain active on the Production partition while a full system backup (SAVE21) is being carried out on the ‘Clone’.
Prerequisites:
Get automatically a clone of the production partition
Backup an IBM i partition with no impact on the production
Based on Flashcopy / SnapShot functions of External Storage (IBM, EMC, …).
Note: in the big majority of the use cases, the CLONED DISKS just needs between 5 to 15 % of the original disk space… It’s really magic !!!
The Flash For i product manages the various hardware and software components involved with the IBM i partition cloning with the aim of making for example backups with a minimal impact on production.
All operations are managed from the Production partition (also called the “source partition”).
The source partition is cloned in 4 steps:
When the clone partition starts after the cloning, very little number of system configuration parameters are adjusted:
The clone partition then restarts in order to apply the new settings.
The Flash For i product also maps/unmaps volumes in the VIOS before stopping or after starting FlashCopy in order to avoid numerous error messages in the VIOS(es) (unless NPIV-type configuration has been performed).
