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Information in its various forms has become so valuable to organizations that the threat of losing important business data is a key concern. More companies are turning to continuous data protection (CDP) technology to ensure the safekeeping of text and files in the event of a system failure.

CDP provides backup of data by automatically saving a copy of each change made to the data by a user, basically capturing each version of the data that a user saves. The technology enables users or administrators to restore data to any point in time, for files, e-mail messages, mailboxes and databases. Depending on the CDP product used, different methods are used to capture continuous changes in data.

According to online encyclopedia Wikipedia, s ome products might be marketed as continuous data protection but might let users restore only at fixed intervals, such as one hour ago or 24 hours ago. “Some do not consider this to be true [CDP], as you do not have the ability to restore to any point in time,” Wikipedia notes. “There is some debate in the industry as to whether the granularity of backup needs to be ‘every write’ in order to be considered CDP or whether a solution which captures the data every few seconds is good enough.”

Many organizations “ have taken the principles of CDP — continuously capture changed blocks or files and write them to disk, providing multiple previous points in time to recover from,” says Lauren Whitehouse, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “ Organizations just may not be using ‘true CDP’ solutions to accomplish this.”

Some vendors, such as Microsoft, FalconStor and Symantec, offer products that take snapshots of data in small time intervals, only transferring changed blocks, Whitehouse says. “These solutions are getting traction in companies of all sizes,” she says. “Companies with applications that have [little tolerance for downtime or data loss] implement true CDP solutions” from vendors such as Asempra, InMage Systems, CA, Mendocino Software, BakBone Software and EMC.

“The focus today is on applications such as Exchange, SQL, Oracle, etc., and it's all about how quickly the application and data can be recovered,” Whitehouse says. “Recovery to the second or minute prior to the interruption, as well as rapidly recovering the application [for example, closing the gap between the disruption and the application's availability] is why CDP gets adopted.”

Packaging and delivery of CDP has been simplified, Whitehouse says. CDP is often a feature of backup and replication, and is delivered via hardware appliances or virtual appliances. “This cuts down on the deployment and implementation of these products,” she says.

The main benefits of CDP technology are centered around the rapid recovery of applications and data, the ability to "dial back" to a previous point in time — typically in very granular time intervals — so the minimum amount of data is lost, Whitehouse says. “There are backup window benefits too,” she says. “Traditional backup waits until a scheduled point in time to kick off a copy of the data. With a large

backlog of transactions to capture, this could take a while. CDP, on the other hand, is making a copy of changes continuously, eliminating the concept of a backup window.”

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