Anyone confused by CDP
The term Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is defined by SNIA as: A data protection service that captures changes to data to a separate storage location. There are multiple methods for capturing the continuous changes involving different technologies that serve different needs. CDP-based solutions can provide fine granularities of restorable objects ranging from crash-consistent images to logical objects such as files, mail boxes, messages, etc. I used to think I knew what it meant, but after attending a discussion about CDP last week at the DR/DP Summit it seems to me that vendors are latching onto the term just to sell their wares. Cluster vendors are trying to sell their products as CDP, when all they are really selling is a cluster on steroids. In my opinion you have to meet, at least, the following criteria to even think about using the term CDP with your wares:
- You must support multiple platforms. Unix, Linux, Windows, or Mainframe.
- You must be able to roll back the writes for your entire environment to a single point in time, if you choose.
- You must be able to roll back the writes for a single application to a single point in time, if you choose.
- You must be able to replicate all changes to a remote site for recovery of the protected data.