Replication Age Inconsistency

Result: Data Corruption 

The signature
Replication age inconsistency

The impact
The impact of inconsistent point-in-time copy devices, such as, an EMC BCV, Clone, or Snap Volume, or NetApp FlexClone or SnapShot is that if the data is needed for a recovery purpose, the data contained in the copy is corrupted due to devices being out of sync with each other. In an EMC SRDF / NetApp SnapMirror replication strategy, point-in-time copies safe guard against rolling disasters. Rolling disasters are when data corruption is replicated to the disaster recovery replica as well. Point-in-time copies become the disk based recovery.

Technical details
In this example, multiple point-in-time copy groups are associated with a Veritas VxVM volume group that contains three storage volumes for a production database. A device in each the point-in-time group is in the wrong point-in-time group. Any data contained across the device group would not be usable.

Can it happen to me?
Environments relying on rolling or revolving point-in-time copies often have this gap because they are not mounted and regularly used by other processes. The gap is created when one or more devices are referenced in the wrong split and establish scripts.