Azure provides native snapshot capabilities that are useful when creating backups of Azure disks. This function is adequate for basic backup/restore use cases. But for many dev/test database environments, it can be expensive when there are dozens of cloned copies. More specifically, many developers rely on databases to test against their scripts, applications, or analytics engines. Performing these tests on live production databases is not an option. Therefore, snapshots and clones are essential for many developers. Everpure Cloud Dedicated allows developers to instantaneously create snapshot copies and clones of production databases. The data reduction engine of Everpure Cloud Dedicated reduces the overall costs of creating the database snapshots and clones since only new and unique blocks of data consume additional storage space. Customers can potentially create hundreds of snapshots and clones without consuming any storage or incurring any additional costs.