Organizations begin with IT-based applications residing in the data center and, after discovering the benefits and becoming more comfortable with the technology, they begin to expand virtualization deployments. As they start virtualizing user-facing applications, new challenges arise.

For those applications, consolidation is not the focus; high availability and data protection are. As a result, any task that limits productivity or scalability, such as I/O-intensive backup, must be examined carefully.

Traditional backup processes aren’t always the best solution in virtual deployments. They weren’t built for the extreme data redundancy and hefty server loads of consolidated environments.