Veritas Storage Foundation offers a flexible and efficient means of managing business-critical data. Storage Foundation lets you capture an online image of an actively changing database at a given instant, called a point-in-time copy.

More and more, the expectation is that the data must be continuously available (24x7) for transaction processing, decision making, intellectual property creation, and so forth. Protecting the data from loss or destruction is also increasingly important. Formerly, data was taken out of service so that the data did not change while data backups occured; however, this option does not meet the need for minimal down time.

A point-in-time copy enables you to maximize the online availability of the data. You can perform system backup, upgrade, or perform other maintenance tasks on the point-in-time copies. The point-in-time copies can be processed on the same host as the active data, or a different host. If required, you can offload processing of the point-in-time copies onto another host to avoid contention for system resources on your production server. This method is called off-host processing. If implemented correctly, off-host processing solutions have almost no impact on the performance of the primary production system.