Bunches of vendors are adding continuous or near-continuous data protection (CDP) software to their suites of backup software. Among those are EMC, Symantec, IBM and HP and a host of start-ups, including Mendocino, Mimosa Systems, Atempo and Timespring.

While CDP software or appliances now supplement a customer’s normal data protection and backup software, in the future I can see them being included as a standard feature or option of those products. Instead of a separate product, they will be part or integrated with a vendors’ product – to wit, IBM’s Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files or Symantec’s Backup Exec 10d.

Users too will add CDP to their data protection arsenal – they’ll have backup and recovery software like EMC’s Legato Networker for nightly backups, CDP software like that from Mimosa for more granular recovery and disaster recovery software in the event of a well, um … disaster. What customers buy will depend on how granular the backup must be and how fast recovery of files and data needs to be.

Mendocino Software, which OEMs its product to HP, this week realized that not all customers need to have a true CDP product. The company announced a blend of near-CDP and CDP products. Its software will let users backup files continuously or near continuously as they desire. For instance, with Mendocino’s InfiniView, a storage administrator can set a policy that says: “files or data are backed up continuously for the first three days, then the policy takes over and backs them up every 30 minutes,” allowing the customer to save on storage capacity.

Yosemite Technologies also last week announced that it had acquired FileKeeper, a vendor of continuous data protection software. Like Mendocino, Yosemite Technologies is taking a dual approach to CDP and will market FileKeeper separately and as part of its Yosemite Backup software.

Storage in the news:

* Sepaton is shipping a new DeltaStor data deduplication appliance for small and midsize data centers and is unveiling new versions of its virtual tape library (VTL) appliances. The S2100-ES2 DeltaStor deduplication appliance for large businesses is now shipping; the S2100-ES2 Series 500 and S2100-DS2 also are now shipping.

* IBM rolled out a midrange tape library with encryption capabilities.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.