Only the reliability measures of business servers (such as active-active storage, multiple replicas, HA, and automatic system restart in case of failures) are not enough to address business data failures such as deletion of data by mistake or ransomware attacks within a VM, because such failures directly damage the data source and thereby damage the replicated data as well. For example, in ransomware attacks has resulted in internal data corruption within business systems, rendering multiple replicas ineffective as each replica is corrupted.

In response to such failures, HCI relies on a quick backup mechanism, which uses an initial full backup, followed by incremental backups, along with the bitmap technology (which is used to mark the changed locations in the QCOW2 file, also known as dirty data locations) for quick backup.

Applicable scenario: General data protection, with an RPO of up to hourly level and an RTO of minutes.