CHICAGO - Continuous data protection, the new darling of the storage market, got lots of play at last week's Storage Decisions conference.

A host of vendors, including FalconStor and Veritas, announced products falling into this category. The back-up and recovery technology, also known as CDP, continuously saves data to disk so that information can be recovered from any point in time, even minutes ago.

"CDP is like insurance," said Brad O'Neill, senior analyst for Taneja Group. "Customers have built huge production environments that all the company's assets are riding on. Even though it is expensive to protect, you have to ensure that the asset is protected."

Veritas aired software, code-named Panther, for recovering files and data adhering to Microsoft's Common Internet File System format. Like Microsoft's recently announced Data Protection Manager, the Veritas software is designed to help end users find lost data without the assistance of IT staff.

Future versions will support backup and recovery of e-mail and database files, Veritas says. The company has no plans to protect Unix or Linux Network File System data. Further, Panther will work only on Windows 2003 Server networks that use Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Services, which creates point-in-time snapshots of data.

The current software is in beta testing, with a final product expected to ship by year-end.

Meanwhile, FalconStor announced that its Virtual Tape Library (VTL) software now will include support for CDP products, as well as traditional back-up software from Veritas, Legato and IBM/Tivoli. FalconStor's VTL technology, which is the basis for EMC's Clariion Disk Library and Copan System's Revolution 200T, is priced starting at $25,000.

Revivio, a start-up in the CDP market, said it has begun shipping a version of its CPS 1200 that enables end users to recover Microsoft Exchange e-mails without calling on IT staff. Pricing was not available.

Also at the show Softek announced enhancements to its Disaster Recovery Manager and Replicator products. The company says users of its disaster-recovery software now can confirm that files are protected and recoverable, while users of its replication software can ensure remote data copying is taking place even if an application fails over to another node in a cluster. Disaster Recovery Manager, which is priced starting at $30,000, is for Z/OS and OS/390 mainframe environments; Softek Replicator works with Windows and is compatible with Microsoft Cluster Services. It starts at $2,500.