BACKGROUND

Businesses worldwide recognize the commercial value of their data and seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect the information stored on their computer networks while minimizing impact on productivity. A company might back up critical computing systems such as databases, virtual machines, file servers, web servers, and so on as part of a daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance schedule. The company may similarly protect computing systems used by each of its employees, such as those used by an accounting department, marketing department, engineering department, and so forth. Given the rapidly expanding volume of data under management, innovative techniques for managing data growth also are sought-after. For instance, companies may implement migration techniques for moving data to lower cost storage over time. Throughout these efforts at moving data to protected and/or lower-cost storage, efficiency and minimal impact to infrastructure and production environments remains an important concern.

