text: The business applications for FlashCopy are wide-ranging. Common use cases for 
  FlashCopy include, but are not limited to, the following examples: 
  
  (cid:2) Rapidly creating consistent backups of dynamically changing data 
  
  (cid:2) Rapidly creating consistent copies of production data to facilitate data movement or 
  migration between hosts 
  
  (cid:2) Rapidly creating copies of production data sets for application development and testing 
  
  (cid:2) Rapidly creating copies of production data sets for auditing purposes and data mining 
  
  (cid:2) Rapidly creating copies of production data sets for quality assurance 
  
  Regardless of your business needs, FlashCopy within the IBM Spectrum Virtualize is flexible 
  and offers a broad feature set, which makes it applicable to several scenarios. 
  
  **Back up improvements with FlashCopy**
  FlashCopy does not reduce the time that it takes to perform a backup to traditional backup 
  infrastructure. However, it can be used to minimize and under certain conditions, eliminate 
  application downtime that is associated with performing backups. FlashCopy can also transfer 
  the resource usage of performing intensive backups from production systems. 
  
  After the FlashCopy is performed, the resulting image of the data can be backed up to tape, 
  as though it were the source system. After the copy to tape is completed, the image data is 
  redundant and the target volumes can be discarded. For time-limited applications, such as 
  these examples, “no copy” or incremental FlashCopy is used most often. The use of these 
  methods puts less load on your servers infrastructure. 