In many legacy storage arrays, a snapshot is a read-only "view" of the data, and if you want to mount it and write to it (for testing or database recovery), you must create a "Clone" or "linked clone" from that snapshot.
PowerFlex differs here. A PowerFlex snapshot is technically just another volume. It is fully writable immediately upon creation. It uses a redirect-on-write mechanism. If a host mounts a snapshot and writes to it, the new data is written to new blocks, diverging from the source volume. This makes PowerFlex snapshots extremely agile for DevOps and CI/CD workflows where writable copies are needed instantly.