In this article, we will discuss what IBM Flashcopy is, how it works and the practical use cases of IBM Flashcopy. IBM FlashCopy for IBM i is used to make a point in time copy of a source volume over the content of a target volume. Although the copy operation takes time, the resulting data at the target appears as though the copy was made instantaneously.
So this allows an effective backup to disk which remains online until the next Flashcopy is taken. This ‘snapshot’ type technology is not new but has traditionally been difficult to introduce in an IBM i environment which has historically run on internal disk. With IBM POWER Servers being increasingly supported by IBMs Storwize product range (V7000, V5000 etc), Storwize’s Flashcopy capability can provide near real-time backups with little or no planned downtime. This Flashcopy capability is not limited to supporting IBMi environments, indeed it can support any type of Server environment. When an IBM i partition is copied using Flashcopy, the entire partition is copied: SLIC, OS, Licensed Programs, system and IP settings, user data, spool files, jobs on job queues.