A data management system having a storage appliance configured to store a snapshot of a virtual machine; and one or more processors in communication with the storage appliance. The one or more processors are configured to perform operations including: identifying a plurality of shards of the virtual machine; requesting a shard snapshot of each of the plurality of shards; receiving the shard snapshots asynchronously; ordering the received shard snapshots sequentially into a results queue; and storing a single snapshot of the virtual machine based on the ordered shard snapshots. The operations may further include maintaining a flow control queue that limits a number of the requested shard snapshots.