The continuing growth of managed data creates frustrating and costly storage management prob-lems for IT managers and network administrators. With corporate data amounts doubling every year and a shift to 24 X 7 X 365 operations, one of the most difficult challenges facing IT managers is backing up of continuously expanding data volumes. Scheduled down time or slow time (other-wise known as the backup window) for data backup is no longer being tolerated.In the past, there have been two basic ways to back-up data on a group of systems. Today there is now a third approach emerging that is generally referred to as LAN-free backup. LAN-free backup involves attaching a central back-up device to a Storage Area Network (SAN) which all attached servers share.