I would like VGS to be added to SPS

Goodday

As part of our Oracle in a SAP environment landscape we do bi-weekly refreshes of PROD onto a QA system.

We also get ad-hoc requests for other clones as well as clones for Projects that means we need to keep a snapshot around for 6-12 months untouched.

This would require the equivalent of a Clone or a traditional NOCOPY Flashcopy from a Remote Mirror.

We currently have 2 FS9500 one each at PROD and QA/DR.

They are using Volume Group Replication Policies and the PROD VG data is being replicated to QA/DR site.

SPS makes use of traditional Flashcopy mappings where FS9500 has a new feature called VGS(Volume Group Snapshot)

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/flashsystem-7x00/8.5.x?topic=snapshots-creating-volume-groups

Although we can still do FlashCopy on FS9500 this would be counter-intuitive and redundant, since we would be using 2 distinctly different mechanisms to do the same thing.

I am also not sure if when using FlashCopy in the FS9500 is it still CoW or RoW?

Also FlashCopy if managed under SPS does have a managed capacity license whereas with VGS it is part of the effective capacity license of the controller.

It would be very beneficial if this feature can be added/integrated into SPS and also add additional support for the new functionality of the FS9500 Copy Services and Replication.

Regards

Anwar