Hi guys, i'm trying to implement some kind of snapshot protection throughout all of our arrays. I have enabled Fusion. We're currently protecting the data with a 3rd party backup solution. I'm wondering how much of an impact to performance and space is enabled snapshots going to cause?. Since we're already protected, we're not looking into a very long retention with these backups (probably a week or so). I'm open to recommendations around this topic. Thanks!
Adding one detail on top of mreinke's answer above: capacity accounting on snapshots is delta-based at fine (1 MiB) granularity, so an unchanged snapshot costs essentially nothing since you're only consuming the blocks that actually changed since the last one. With a ~1 week retention layered on your existing backup tool, that's a low-risk setup either way. One habit worth keeping regardless of snapshots is watching your overall system space alerts (Everpure recommends a yellow threshold around 75% and red around 95%) as general hygiene, not because anything here is a red flag.
Cheers!
Mike
Great recommendation Mr. Nelson - thanks for chiming in with more detail around this.
Hi,
For FlashArray, enabling snapshots should have negligible performance impact. Snapshots are created nearly instantaneously using array-native, copy-on-write technology; creating them does not add the same performance overhead associated with software or hypervisor snapshots.
The capacity impact depends primarily on the workload’s change rate and retention period—not the logical size of the volume. Snapshots retain changed blocks, and Pure’s global data reduction typically makes them very space-efficient. Highly overwrite-intensive, encrypted, or already-compressed workloads may consume more capacity, so it is worth monitoring actual snapshot consumption.
Consider the following:
Hope this helps!
