Last week, we highlighted the fact that data center managers are well positioned to take leadership roles in the areas of information lifecycle management and business-continuity planning/disaster recovery. A key enabling technology for both ILM and BCP/DR is continuous data protection.

As previously noted, ILM maps the storage infrastructure to the data type, according to the ongoing business value of the information at hand and the compliance policies that govern it. And BCP/DR ensures that data is appropriately available in the event of a failure.

Broadly speaking, continuous data protection, or CDP, refers to the ability to back up desktop and server data in real time to disk on a regular basis, essentially eliminating the need for daily or weekly batch backups. Moreover, CDP software can integrate additional data “grooming” and searching capabilities, such as search engines (so users can scan backups for specific content, not just by filename) and anti-malware capabilities, so data can be disinfected during backup. Significantly, as highlighted below, one of the new CDP products on the market is provided by Symantec, the anti-virus maker that purchased Veritas last year.

There are two major business advantages provided by CDP. First is the ability to back up information transparently, without requiring bulk file transfers. Second is the ability to recover from crashes in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks.

Exactly how long recovery takes depends on the type of CDP product. There are two basic flavors: those that record every change to data at the byte level, which allow users to “dial back” to any point in time (enabling recovery in minutes) and those that take periodic snapshots of files, allowing recovery back to specific points in time (enabling recovery in hours). The distinction is often marked by calling the former “continuous” and the latter “near-continuous.”

Several major vendors have recently brought out near-continuous data protection products, including:
* IBM’s Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files.
* Symantec’s Backup Exec 10d for Windows Servers.
* Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager (DPM).

Smaller vendors, such as Mendocino Software, Revivio, Mimosa Systems, and Xosoft also offer continuous or near-continuous data protection software. The major holdout at present is EMC, which is widely expected to make its own foray into this market by year-end.