EXPERT RESPONSE
VARs are playing an increasing and key function in rolling out DR and data security solutions that can include CDP. Given that many complete data protection approaches and strategies need to incorporate products and technologies from different vendors, there is a natural fit for a VAR to help pull different disparate technologies into a compressive data protection offering. As CDP techniques and capacities migrate into mainstream existing products, there will be less of a need to integrate individual point solutions as there is today, however there will be plenty of new opportunities for VARs to identify new areas within a business where tiered data protection combining variable recovery point and recover time objectives can be leveraged.
A role VARs can play in rolling out CDP enabled solutions is to help their customers define what level and granularity of data protection (tiered data protection) are needed for different applications and data. For applications and data requiring transactional integrity and application coherency, additional software and agents may be required to compliment fine grained CDP point products. For a much larger base of applications, VARs can leverage CDP enabled technologies to ensure that data is protected more often than daily, weekly or even monthly.
The real advantages and benefits of CDP will be for a much broader audience of environments of all sizes that do not require sub-second or sub minute, rather coarser data protection. Another big area that VARs can help customers with is to build business cases for CDP enabled backup technologies to reduce the time required to scan file systems in preparation for data movement during backup. By working with customers, VARs can build business case models showing the amount of I/O and overhead saved from performing file scans that can be re-used for other more useful work as well as improving the timeliness of data protection or the RPO and RTO. Of course there is the much hyped benefit of dynamic recovery points that become a bonus.
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