InfoScale™ 9.0 Storage and Availability Management for DB2 Databases - AIX, Linux

How a Storage Checkpoint works

The Storage Checkpoint facility freezes the mounted file system (known as the primary fileset), initializes the Storage Checkpoint, and thaws the file system. Specifically, the file system is first brought to a stable state where all of its data is written to disk, and the freezing process momentarily blocks all I/O operations to the file system. A Storage Checkpoint is then created without any actual data; the Storage Checkpoint instead points to the block map of the primary fileset. The thawing process that follows restarts I/O operations to the file system.

You can create a Storage Checkpoint on a single file system or a list of file systems. A Storage Checkpoint of multiple file systems simultaneously freezes the file systems, creates a Storage Checkpoint on all of the file systems, and thaws the file systems. As a result, the Storage Checkpoints for multiple file systems have the same creation timestamp. The Storage Checkpoint facility guarantees that multiple file system Storage Checkpoints are created on all or none of the specified file systems, unless there is a system crash while the operation is in progress.

A Storage Checkpoint of the primary fileset initially contains only pointers to the existing data blocks in the primary fileset, and does not contain any allocated data blocks of its own.

Figure: Primary fileset and its Storage Checkpoint shows the file system /database and its Storage Checkpoint. The Storage Checkpoint is logically identical to the primary fileset when the Storage Checkpoint is created, but it does not contain any actual data blocks.

Figure: Primary fileset and its Storage Checkpoint

In Figure: Initializing a Storage Checkpoint, a square represents each block of the file system. This figure shows a Storage Checkpoint containing pointers to the primary fileset at the time the Storage Checkpoint is taken, as in Figure: Primary fileset and its Storage Checkpoint.

Figure: Initializing a Storage Checkpoint

The Storage Checkpoint presents the exact image of the file system by finding the data from the primary fileset. VxFS updates a Storage Checkpoint by using the copy-on-write technique.

See Copy-on-write.