SnowMirror Drive

Move ServiceNow attachments
to your own cloud

How does Drive work?

SnowMirror Drive is a ServiceNow App. Once SnowMirror Drive is installed on your ServiceNow instance, it works on a cloud-to-cloud basis –  no MID server required. Just point SnowMirror Drive to the storage of your choice and set the rules by which your attachments should be moved. The SnowMirror team guarantees that it will keep up with every new ServiceNow release.

SnowMirror Drive is made by GuideVision, a leading European ServiceNow integrator with more than a decade of focus only on ServiceNow. GuideVision is an Infosys company.

Features
& Specifications

Improve ServiceNow performance

Deliver a smoother and more responsive ServiceNow experience by shifting large attachments to cloud platforms.

Save on storage costs

Save storage costs by up to 90% by seamlessly moving attachments out of your ServiceNow instance and on to your own preferred storage solution (Azure, S3, or on-premise storage).

License compliance

Keep your ServiceNow instance size under its limit so you don’t get charged extra for storage space. 

Security compliance

Critical attachments can be removed from ServiceNow to a safer storage.

Reasons to buy

Save big on ServiceNow storage costs

Medium-sized ServiceNow customers can typically save up to $100,000 annually on storage costs, and large customers up to $500,000. Storage, especially of large attachments, can become a significant cost if not kept under control. SnowMirror Drive moves your attachments to the more cost-effective cloud storage of your choice, making significant differences in savings and performance.

Improve ServiceNow performance

Most medium-to-large ServiceNow customers experience degraded performance and responsiveness of their ServiceNow instance because of storage usage. SnowMirror Drive helps by reducing the size of the ServiceNow instance.

SnowMirror Drive scales to your needs

SnowMirror Drive scales to the biggest ServiceNow instances and customers. The bigger your ServiceNow instance, the more you save on license costs and the more user experience and performance improves.

Pricing

Free Trial

Lite

Pro

Max

Moving Attachment

Advanced Reporting

Initial Setup Support Package

Amount of Attachments

100

1 mil.

5 mil.

20 mil.

Data Limit

100 MB

1 TB

5 TB

20 TB

Support

Silver 8 x 5

Silver 8 x 5

Gold 8 x 5

Platinum 24 x 7

License Period

30 days

3 years

3 years

3 years

All prices are monthly excluding VAT or other taxes. Standard contract duration is 36 months or longer. Minimal contract lenght is 12 months.

Free Trial

Moving Attachment

Advanced Reporting

Initial Setup Support Package

Amount of Attachments

100

Data Limit

100 MB

Support

Silver 8 x 5

License Period

30 days

All prices are monthly excluding VAT or other taxes. Standard contract duration is 36 months or longer. Minimal contract lenght is 12 months.

Lite

Moving Attachment

Advanced Reporting

Initial Setup Support Package

Amount of Attachments

1 mil.

Data Limit

1 TB

Support

Silver 8 x 5

License Period

3 years

All prices are monthly excluding VAT or other taxes. Standard contract duration is 36 months or longer. Minimal contract lenght is 12 months.

Pro

Moving Attachment

Advanced Reporting

Initial Setup Support Package

Amount of Attachments

5 mil.

Data Limit

5 TB

Support

Gold 8 x 5

License Period

3 years

All prices are monthly excluding VAT or other taxes. Standard contract duration is 36 months or longer. Minimal contract lenght is 12 months.

Max

Moving Attachment

Advanced Reporting

Initial Setup Support Package

Amount of Attachments

20 mil.

Data Limit

20 TB

Support

Platinum 24 x 7

License Period

3 years

All prices are monthly excluding VAT or other taxes. Standard contract duration is 36 months or longer. Minimal contract lenght is 12 months.

FAQs

What is SnowMirror?

SnowMirror creates a ServiceNow read-replica in your own database. Having selected ServiceNow tables in your data center can have many benefits. These are the three most popular use cases:

  1. Reporting and Business Intelligence – Connect your corporate reporting to the local mirror database without impacting your production ServiceNow environment.
  2. Simplifying Integrations – Read-only integrations do not need a live connection to ServiceNow. Connect your applications to a mirror database and simplify your integration architecture.
  3. Backup and Disaster Recovery – Backup data and documents to your data center and make SnowMirror part of your disaster recovery plans.

SnowMirror creates a ServiceNow read-replica in your own database. Having selected ServiceNow tables in your data center can have many benefits. These are the three most popular use cases:

  1. Reporting and Business Intelligence – Connect your corporate reporting to the local mirror database without impacting your production ServiceNow environment.
  2. Simplifying Integrations – Read-only integrations do not need a live connection to ServiceNow. Connect your applications to a mirror database and simplify your integration architecture.
  3. Backup and Disaster Recovery – Backup data and documents to your data center and make SnowMirror part of your disaster recovery plans.

SnowMirror creates a ServiceNow read-replica in your own database. Having selected ServiceNow tables in your data center can have many benefits. These are the three most popular use cases:

  1. Reporting and Business Intelligence – Connect your corporate reporting to the local mirror database without impacting your production ServiceNow environment.
  2. Simplifying Integrations – Read-only integrations do not need a live connection to ServiceNow. Connect your applications to a mirror database and simplify your integration architecture.
  3. Backup and Disaster Recovery – Backup data and documents to your data center and make SnowMirror part of your disaster recovery plans.

SnowMirror creates a ServiceNow read-replica in your own database. Having selected ServiceNow tables in your data center can have many benefits. These are the three most popular use cases:

  1. Reporting and Business Intelligence – Connect your corporate reporting to the local mirror database without impacting your production ServiceNow environment.
  2. Simplifying Integrations – Read-only integrations do not need a live connection to ServiceNow. Connect your applications to a mirror database and simplify your integration architecture.
  3. Backup and Disaster Recovery – Backup data and documents to your data center and make SnowMirror part of your disaster recovery plans.

SnowMirror creates a ServiceNow read-replica in your own database. Having selected ServiceNow tables in your data center can have many benefits. These are the three most popular use cases:

  1. Reporting and Business Intelligence – Connect your corporate reporting to the local mirror database without impacting your production ServiceNow environment.
  2. Simplifying Integrations – Read-only integrations do not need a live connection to ServiceNow. Connect your applications to a mirror database and simplify your integration architecture.
  3. Backup and Disaster Recovery – Backup data and documents to your data center and make SnowMirror part of your disaster recovery plans.

SnowMirror creates a ServiceNow read-replica in your own database. Having selected ServiceNow tables in your data center can have many benefits. These are the three most popular use cases:

  1. Reporting and Business Intelligence – Connect your corporate reporting to the local mirror database without impacting your production ServiceNow environment.
  2. Simplifying Integrations – Read-only integrations do not need a live connection to ServiceNow. Connect your applications to a mirror database and simplify your integration architecture.
  3. Backup and Disaster Recovery – Backup data and documents to your data center and make SnowMirror part of your disaster recovery plans.

SnowMirror creates a ServiceNow read-replica in your own database. Having selected ServiceNow tables in your data center can have many benefits. These are the three most popular use cases:

  1. Reporting and Business Intelligence – Connect your corporate reporting to the local mirror database without impacting your production ServiceNow environment.
  2. Simplifying Integrations – Read-only integrations do not need a live connection to ServiceNow. Connect your applications to a mirror database and simplify your integration architecture.
  3. Backup and Disaster Recovery – Backup data and documents to your data center and make SnowMirror part of your disaster recovery plans.
Is it possible to configure a high-available SnowMirror setup?

Yes. If you need high availability there is a possibility to install several SnowMirror installations. Some of our customers even install one SnowMirror into their DRC centers. SnowMirror architecture is cluster-ready and if one node goes down the other node is still synchronizing the data. We usually support this kind of requirements individually and we cooperate on the customer cluster design.

The HA setup is available only for the MAX Edition.

No. The only mandatory requirement is to have a user account which has sufficient rights to access ServiceNow data and meta-data. However, if using the SOAP API,  we recommend activating the Aggregate Web Services ServiceNow plug-in to improve the user experience, enable a few fancy features and add a small performance boost.

No. If you have several ServcieNow instances you have to install several SnowMirrors. The idea behind it is the same as for the MID servers.

Yes. And it is quite usual to run a mirror for a test ServiceNow instance and a development instance on one server. It is necessary to configure different ports and different Windows service names. Use the Custom Installation option if installing using the Windows installer. A similar approach applies to Linux systems.

SnowMirror in not resource intensive. It is a Java application running as a Windows service or a Unix daemon. It requires a server to be installed on. The server can be a small virtual or physical machine. The typical configuration is a dual core CPU server with 2 GB RAM and 5 GB HDD. We even recommend to install SnowMirror on the same machine as the ServiceNow MID server. You can save one server using this approach.

Read more about SnowMirror requirements in the admin guide:
http://www.snow-mirror.com/doc/#section-servicenow

The Aggregate Web Services plug-in is a small plugin adding the aggregate method into all direct web services in ServiceNow. SnowMirror is using this new operation to count the records to insert or update before the actual download starts. By activating the plugin the progress bars work better, the count buttons enable you to count records in tables and SnowMirror is able to optimize the downloading algorithm a bit.

The main database is the mirror DB where the ServiceNow data is being stored. However, SnowMirror requires to maintain its configuration in a second database. So-called config DB. The config DB is configured during the installation phase and it is using H2 embedded database by default. The mirror DB can be configured in SnowMirror Settings page.

See the picture of the whole SnowMirror architecture.

What is Data Truncation error?

If your synchronization failed and you got an error similar to java.sql.BatchUpdateException: Data truncation, it can have two different root causes.

1) Something has changed on the ServiceNow side. Usually someone made a string field longer than before. For example your ServiceNow admin made incident short_description longer (max length) from 80 to 200. So it means the new incident subjects cannot fit into your varchar(80) in the mirror database. To fix this, either manually alter the mirror table (column) or re-create the whole synchronization and perform an initial data load.

2) ServiceNow does not always respect its own data constraints. E.g. try to synchronize the sys_perspective table and it fails by default because one column in this table is configured to have 40 chars as its max length however the longest string in the column has 125 characters by default. There is no other solution than to manually alter the mirror database table to reflect the real situation.

Auto Schema Update feature enables to modify the mirrored table automatically according to the changes on the ServiceNow side. If enabled all the table columns are being synchronized. If there is a new columns in ServcieNow, SnowMirror automatically adds it into the mirror table. The same applies for modified columns a removed ones.

ServiceNow enables to specify a parent for a table. It means all the columns in the parent table are used for the child table as well. For example the table task (parent) and incident (child). Many tables are derived from the task table. The whole CMDB is build on this inheritance design pattern. Etc.

SnowMirror enables two approaches when synchronizing inherited tables (e.g. incident)

1) Synchronize two tables. This is the way ServiceNow itself stores the data. You have to synchronize two tables (e.g. task and incident) and to obtain the incident record you have to join the tables using the sys_id primary key in both tables. The advantage of this approach is lower redundancy. If you are synchronizing several tables derived from the task table the situation is simpler to perform some type of queries.

2) Synchronize only one table with all parent inherited columns included. This is an approach that a typical user expects. To sync the data as it is displayed in the web application. Check the checkbox Include inherited columns  in the synchronization settings to choose this approach.

To identify new or updated records in ServiceNow is a straightforward way. However to find the records deleted in a certain time window is not so simple. Most of the tables are audited so the default strategy search for deleted records in the system journals. You can choose different strategies if you need or if the table is not being audited. Truncate option means to perform Clean & Synchronize operation for every sync run (initial load every run). Diff is a good way to find the deleted records in a non-audited table and None ignores the deletes at all.

Please read more about the delete strategies in our user guide.

Please note that synchronization settings for Views do not contain the delete strategy choice at all. It always performs the Truncate option because there is no way how to achieve incremental updates.

SnowMirror does not access the database directly. ServiceNow does not allow neither customers not partners to access the underlying instance database. All the data is downloaded using the our-of-the-box API called Direct Web Services. Event the original ODBC driver uses this API which is the reason why the driver is so limited and slow.

SnowMirror distribution contains an optional ServiceNow dashboard application. If you have installed the update set into your ServiceNow instance enable this setting to start sending SnowMirror activity into the ServiceNow instance.

Do we have to pay for SnowMirror connected to a test instance?

No. You pay only for every SnowMirror connected to your production ServiceNow instance. Test, UAT, development or sandbox instances are for free.

SnowMirror license is bound to a certain ServiceNow instance host name (e.g. yourcompany.service-now.com). So the ServiceNow host name you configure in Settings -> ServiceNow has to match the license host name. Please do not forget to restart SnowMirror after you change the instance in the Settings. In case of a trial license please feel free to generate yourself another trial license on our website if you need if for a different ServiceNow instance.