Patent ID: 7546484

Claim:
At a light-weight storage node server of a computerized environment that includes one or more production servers and a centralized backup server configured to administer backup solutions of data at the one or more production servers, a method of backing up data of at least one of the one or more production servers in accordance with instructions received from the centralized backup server, comprising the acts of: receiving control settings at a light-weight storage node server from a centralized backup server, the control settings configured to instruct an assigned set of one or more production servers in accordance with a protection intent, wherein the centralized backup server stores control settings for each of one or more light-weight storage node servers but does not store backup data from the one or more production servers; the light-weight storage node server communicating the protection intent to the assigned one or more production servers, wherein the protection intent instructs each of the assigned one or more production servers to create backups at a specified interval; receiving an application-consistent snapshot of a data set from the production server, wherein the application-consistent snapshot represents a first point-in-time; receiving an application-consistent snapshot of an update to the data set from the production server, wherein the application-consistent snapshot represents a second point-in-time of the data set; and storing at least the first point-in-time and the second point-in-time snapshots of the data set from the production server in a storage volume of the light-weight storage node server such that the snapshots are stored on the storage node server rather than on the centralized backup server.