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CDP--buzz versus benefit.

Article Excerpt
With all of the hype in the industry today over Continuous Data Protection (CDP) solutions, it is sometimes hard to separate the buzz from the benefit. For customers focused on solving real-world problems involving the recovery of business-critical data, understanding the distinction is paramount to making the right choices for safeguarding their electronic assets.

The issue for these customers is that the industry is in a state of constant fluctuation over exactly what defines CDP and what a product must do to earn that label. By the strictest definition of the term, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) defines CDP as "a methodology that continuously captures or tracks data modifications and stores changes independent of the primary data, enabling recovery points from any point in the past. CDP systems may be block-, file- or application-based and can provide fine granularities of restorable objects to infinitely variable recovery points". This is generally interpreted to mean that to be a CDP solution, the product must capture data changes continuously, must store these changes in a location separate from the primary storage and must provide arbitrary and infinite recovery points for the data.

The promise of being able to track every change and instantly recover to any point in time is undoubtedly appealing to companies. But there is a major problem with this promise and that problem is two-fold.

The Problem with CDP

Firstly, the capabilities described by...

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