Storage assisted virtual machine backups using storage VMOTION and XCOPY

A system for transferring data directly from primary storage to secondary storage in a virtualized network including virtual machine (VM) based storage, comprising:

• a storage assisted virtual machine backup component exposing a source volume in the primary storage to a hypervisor host of the virtualized network so that the host an see the source volume, and preparing a destination volume of the secondary storage as an empty volume and exporting it to the hypervisor host so that the host can see the destination volume;
• and
• an interface component moving, in the hypervisor host data from the exposed source volume to the exported empty destination volume using a combination of Storage Direct, Storage VMotion, and XCOPY or enhanced XCOPY technologies, and wherein the XCOPY technology provides a direct transfer of data from the primary storage to the secondary storage when both are in the same storage array, and the enhanced XCOPY technology provides a direct transfer of data from the primary storage to the secondary storage when both are in different storage arrays.