Continuous Data Protection, more commonly known as CDP, is the buzzword du jour in the data protection market. Recent announcements by large, brand-name vendors like Microsoft, IBM/Tivoli and Symantec all tout their latest products as providing continuous data protection, so the market is categorizing all CDP products as “new.”
In fact, CDP products have been around since the late 1990s. Dozens of vendors claim to provide CDP and have their own perspective of what exactly CDP entails. For an additional perspective, Google “CDP software” and you will receive nearly 200,000 results. With that being said, if you take a look at what CDP really means and do your best to avoid the marketing hype, you’ll soon learn that what most vendors are offering is rudimentary and won’t fully protect your business. The majority of CDP offerings claim to provide CDP, but what they are offering is continuous data backup, not continuous data protection. CDP already is into its second generation, and it’s no longer about just backing up data.
First Generation CDP
The basic concept of CDP is that CDP technology captures and backs up data changes in files as they occur or very near to when they occur. With this technology deployed, if you experience a power loss, system failure or virus at any point in the day, you can recover data at a point just minutes or even seconds before the data loss occurred. Compare this with having to restore data from, at best, the previous day’s copy of data from tape, which unfortunately is what the majority of businesses have to do.
Today’s “new” CDP solutions essentially are disk-based servers that sit between the protected server and a traditional tape backup system. These solutions provide continuous local disk backup and storage of short-term history of up to a few weeks. The benefit is that users can recover directly from their disk and experience faster and easier disk-based recoveries of short-term data. Your IT department is still required to perform a nightly backup of the server data onto tape, create a second copy and store one set on site and transport one set physically offsite.
CDP technologies are designed to address two major components of disaster recovery. The first is Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which refers to the amount of time required to fully restore your data. The second is Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which is the amount of data your business can afford to lose after a data loss. With a CDP solution in place, you should be able to restore your data quickly because it is stored onsite using a disk server, thereby lessening your company’s recovery time. CDP technologies have an even greater impact on RPO – given that data changes are stored continuously you can ensure that your business loses very little, if any, data in case of certain types of disasters.
Sounds great, right? And it is a great first step. But it’s not sufficient because continuous data backup is not continuous data protection. While it’s true that your data is continuously backed up to disk and you have the ability to restore that data from the local disk server, with first generation CDP you’re still relying on backing up to tape, with its manual processes, high failure-to-recover rates and nightly operation, as the medium to get data offsite and archive it. You still need an additional solution, either technical or manual, to get these tapes stored safely and remotely offsite, in order to truly protect data and be able to recover from a disaster.
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