Patent 8712962 was granted and assigned to EMC on April, 2014 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
In a first embodiment, a method and computer program product for use in replication comprising pushing a point in time (PIT) to a de-duplication device, creating a virtual LUN based on the PIT pushed to the de-duplication device, and exposing, via a Data Protection Appliance (DPA), the virtual LUN. In a second embodiment, a method and computer program product for use in replication comprising choosing an object to be recovered at a point in time (PI), spawning a virtual machine, creating a virtual LUN based on the PIT, exposing the virtual LUN to the virtual machine, recovering the object from the PIT mounted to the virtual machine, and un-exposing the virtual LUN to the virtual machine.