EXPERT RESPONSE
Continuous data protection (CDP) is certainly one of the popular buzzwords and popular technologies being talked a lot about in the media, from a couple of standpoints. One is to speed up the process of actually backing up data to meet a particular schedule, allowing for more frequent data protection. In other words, a more fine-grained recovery point objective (RPO) as well as what are called variable recovery time objectives (RTO), which are the ones most commonly talked about -- CDP being able to have fine-grained RPO/RTO.
Where I think the really opportunity for CDP is, and most vendors aren't talking about this, is the ability to reduce the amount of time it takes to do backup, and also the amount of time and resources it takes to do backup without having to go out and spend time doing IOs to a file system or a database server to determine what data has changed. So there's a real opportunitiy moving forward as the major backup vendors -- Symantec, EMC, CommVault, IBM Tivoli, Asigras and others -- work CDP capabilities into their core products to be able to transparently provide, not only variable recovery times and recovery point objectives, but also to back up and protect data with less impact to the organization.
The above Q&A was excerpted from Greg Schulz's disaster recovery services podcast. For the complete collection of Q&As, visit our Tips-to-Go: Data Disaster Recovery Services Tutorial.
|
