As both security concerns and corporate data stores grow, businesses are more careful than ever in protecting their critical data. And, constantly on a quest to virtually eliminate the application restore windows. As a result they are spending more on sophisticated backup procedures.One of the best ways to protect production data is to use snapshot technology in addition to mirroring and triditional backup. Many vendors offer excellent snapshot capabilities in their hardware devices and storage management applications. However, snapshot technology is often complex and hard to manage,especially for those companies running more than one type of database,platform and disaster recovery applications. Given there challenges, even sophisticated IT departments rarely optimize their snapshot capabilities and many businesses do not use it at all.