The sweet spot for CDP is applications with aggressive RPO and RTO requirements. One of the claims sometimes put forward for CDP is that it obviates the need for traditional backup systems; vendors have argued that CDP logs provide the sole form of recovery.
CDP systems do not provide a clean copy of recovery data. Additional steps are required to ensure that data is consistent both within and between applications. This type of recovery carries inherent risks of system and procedural failures, and the very nature of the RPO and RTO requirements means that it is unlikely that a CDP system alone can meet them.
Action Item: CDP should be the preferred method of recovery but is unlikely to provide the sole backup and recovery system. CDP technology will need to be integrated into the general backup and recovery systems for the data center. Ability to integrate easily should be a major technology selection criterion.
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