Stress-busting with CDP

Keith Richardt, owner of an IT service provider to small and midsize businesses, says he finds continuous-data-protection software helps remove worry about his client data.

Keith Richardt, owner of K-Star, an IT service provider to small and midsize businesses, says he knew as soon as he read a review about TimeSpring Software’s TimeData continuous-data-protection software that the product could remove his worry about how well he was protecting up to 600GB of client data housed at his Atlanta collocation facility.

“For the past five years, we’d gone through the nightmare of inconsistent backups and data recovery needs that weren’t covered,” he says. “Our needs had since grown to the point where we would lie in bed at night and wonder if we were going to be OK in the morning.”

Backing up that much data in a five-hour nightly window was not going to happen, he says. That’s why he wasted no time after hearing how TimeData could sit in the background and collect ongoing changes made to Windows NT File System files or SQL Server database applications. “I spent five years on a quest for a better back-up product. When we read about how TimeSpring worked, we said, ‘That’s it! Let’s get them on the phone right now,'” he says.

After undergoing a straightforward implementation with TimeData more than six months ago, Richardt continues to be amazed at how continuous data-protection technology has lightened his back-up workload. “You can install TimeData on the server you’re protecting, then set it up on another side box called a repository. That repository box then simply collects the I/O calls or delta file changes as they are transpiring on your server.”

Richardt figures the cost of his CDP solution – accounting for hardware and the licensing required for all the agents associated with SQL or Exchange – is about the same as what he’d pay for alternatives that don’t work nearly as well. The alternatives, he says, are redundant systems, a high-end tape library or the license for most common back-up applications. “You get superior data protection with CDP,” he says.

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