In disk arrays, a business continuance volume (BCV) is EMC Corporation's term for an independently addressable copy of a data volume, that uses advanced mirroring technique for business continuity purposes.
Use 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 computing. Once offline processes are completed, these BCVs can be either:
discarded used as a source to recover the production data re-attached (re-synchronized) to the production data again
Types 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 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
See also Operational continuity Business Continuity Institute
References