Hidden Value Behind CDP

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) has experienced periods of sunny and gloomy in recent years. Could be considered as an evolution in technology, backups, IT organizations identify the CDP as a recent addition to the backup, not as a substitute. However, the latest development in technology has led many IT organizations provide a second chance for the CDP. Now, the solution is able to present the most sophisticated of CDP recovery points up within seconds of a failure or a corrupt and reduce recovery time dramatically.

Of course, the CDP promises to alleviate the difficulties surrounding the management of critical information that is felt by most IT organizations. There are no gaps in protection. There are no backup windows, even for virtual machines. A very quick recovery to any point. What makes it not desirable?

However, at the same time, competition is very tight around the financing in today's economic conditions. And as mentioned as an improvement to the backup, the business case for the CDP may not appear to provide adequate incentives for investment, and consequently, it will remain a technology that can not be fully utilized.

However, a large number of organizations have found that CDP provides measurable benefits in other areas besides backups. And, when the use case is considered, the intrinsic value of the CDP was quite make it worth buying more than as additional data protection.

More than Backup
Despite increasing backup operation is a good reason to use CDP, this technology also plays an important role in disaster recovery, storage utilization, and e-discovery.

For example, organizations that implement an off-site disaster recovery, generally replicating data and sending it via the WAN a certain capacity to the destination site. The problem is, it is impossible to determine the appropriate WAN line capacity without also knowing how much data is changing, how fast the changes happen, and when he changed. CDP provides this information.

Unlike the daily incremental backups, which only offer limited information on how much data has changed in the last 24 hours, CDP actually recorded changes every single server application so that the organization could measure the rate of change of actual data. Accuracy of data provided by the CDP to ensure the WAN connection is not too big or too small for the load they'll handle.

CDP can also help organizations maximize the utilization of existing storage media, which ultimately enabled them to save costs by eliminating the need to purchase new storage. By using the same disk used by the CDP for recovery to run test and development applications at once, an organization could postpone or eliminate the investment in additional storage. In other words, organizations can use CDP to use the existing storage for various needs.

Another use case examples of the CDP is to facilitate e-discovery. Unfortunately, this time assigning the system administrator responsible for a variety of e-discovery requests jointly, which can rapidly consume resources on production servers are commonplace. CDP solution that provides integration with an e-Discovery solutions can help alleviate this problem by introducing a snapshot to a remote e-discovery. This not only minimizes the effect of accelerating the search and search on the production server, but it also allows IT to keep the information relevant to save a snapshot or membackupnya in the tape.

Better Data Protection
Of course, the new utilization of the CDP not only reduces its value as a data protection device. CDP enables organizations to eliminate the backup window for applications and databases while improving recovery point and improve their recovery time.

Because CDP record all changes to applications and databases, with the most advanced solution of coffee flowing from the changes in each block of data into a lower class of storage, this device does not only eliminate the potential loss of data, but also help control costs. Moreover, CDP can also reduce the burden on data center infrastructure by eliminating network and server resources associated with traditional backup schedule.

Greater efficiency are ready to come with increasingly integrating CDP and other data protection technology with backup software. With this solution, CDP is generally installed and configured outside of the backup software but once this is done, the management received CDP backup software is running and copy data created CDP. IT can then determine and manage the CDP policy through a general backup management console. Administrators can also customize your backup software to create a restore point based applications with CDP solution, which can be used to create a snapshot for use with long-term backup to disk or tape.

Business Value
The more organizations looking for effective ways to protect against data loss and improve recovery time for critical applications and databases, the CDP will be more widely adopted as a data protection solution. In fact, CDP will significantly increase both the target recovery point and recovery time targets. Integration with the backup application simplifies both the recovery and administration policy by allowing backup administrators to use policy and a standard backup agent to protect the application with the CDP.

Better yet, CDP offers measurable advantages beyond data protection. As exemplified by the cases above, the use of CDP in the business looks more and more urgent. Was used as a tool for disaster recovery, storage utilization, and e-discovery, or used in addition to data protection, CDP is an investment that produces.