Moderator: Peter Burris
Analyst: David Floyer
Continuous data protection (CDP) (and here we include its close cousin, data snapshot capture technology) is a new member of the family of technologies dedicated to improving the overall recoverability of data. However, it offers an interesting departure that is especially effective as we move in a more user-driven, virtualized application world.
Historically data recovery and protection technologies emphasized the need to recover from machine failures. Because data recovery technology evolved at a time when hardware failure was common, most data protection recovery technologies were designed to protect against a larger server, storage device or other machine-level problems. Since then they have been expanded to provide data center-wide recovery protection in the event of a regional disaster.
However, even as organizations were implementing significant backup, restore and recovery technologies, IT recognized that human error and unanticipated application interaction conflicts were also sources of significant data loss and corruption. In general technologies like replication, tape backup, etc., made no effort to address these more complex challenges for backing up and restoring data.
CDP is an important initial foray into the world of protecting organizations from information loss from these more localized but still sometimes devastating events. Effectively CDP creates a running log of writes at a storage level, tagging each disk event with a time stamp to improve the granularity of recovery point objective (RPO) goals down to milliseconds. Consequently when a user performs an error, such as an Exchange user inadvertently deleting a critical e-mail or a software developer inadvertently changing a critical development subsystem under test, it is possible to recover just that data at just the point prior to the execution of the write.
In today’s world, where applications are increasingly tied to the system’s capability to support complex human activity including mobile, collaborative and other types of complex interactions, CDP, which promises information recovery from human error, becomes a more important technology option in the backup/restore continuum.
Additionally we anticipate that the effort to increasingly virtualize physical computing resources will lead to circumstances in which application interactions are no longer predictable, forcing IT toward a CDP-type solution to protect an organization from the consequences of unanticipated application interactions.
The benefits of CDP can be high. However costs can also can be significant: For a modest-sized Exchange implementation it is easy to envision an initial $100,000 out-of-pocket expense for installation and many tens of thousands per year for maintenance and ongoing costs (fully loaded TCO figures). Having said that, CDP emerges as an important new member of the overall backup/restore continuum requiring immediate attention from IT organizations in which the effort to protect information has become paramount due to business needs. Additionally, more cost-effective solutions have hit the market in the past 18 to 24 months which warrant consideration.
Action Item: CDP is a backup and restore technology. However it must not be considered solely in the context of traditional backup/restore technologies but should rather be regarded in terms of the need to protect the business from human error and complex application interactions. Under circumstances where users face burgeoning application complexity, CDP becomes a more viable backup/restore option.
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