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:

  1. You must support multiple platforms. Unix, Linux, Windows, or Mainframe.
  2. You must be able to roll back the writes for your entire environment to a single point in time, if you choose.
  3. You must be able to roll back the writes for a single application to a single point in time, if you choose.
  4. You must be able to replicate all changes to a remote site for recovery of the protected data.
To me CDP is is what Revivio has always called it. Time Addressable Storage or TAS. A technology that records every write to a target devicevia a channel or network and enables you to "play back" those writes to whatever point in time you choose prior to the catastrophic event. Hence the term Continuous Data Protection. I met with Kirby Wadsworth and Michael Rowan about two years ago to discuss, at that time, the soon to be buzzphrase "Continuous Data Protection". At that time no one else even knew what it was. Revivio was the only vendor at SNW that fall even discussing CDP. They have some great technology and everyone else is just trying to catch up, in my opinion. Don't fall for the vendor pitches that say they can do CDP. Make them prove it to you before buying anything. Make them recover your application in their lab and prove it's going to work. If they don't have a lab, tell them to go talk to Toigo and test in his lab. Let me know what you think...