Continuous Data Protection: Securing Data (continued)
Something Completely Different
But CDP takes a different approach entirely. "Backup isn't the issue -- protection is the issue," says Mike Karp, a senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Portsmouth, N.H. "Everyone does backups. The question is, can you recover data in its correct state at the exact point at which it needs to be recovered?"
"Agree," says Benjamin Aronson, president of Aronson & Associates Inc., a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based IT consulting firm. "Recovering data from tape is an arduous, time-consuming chore," he says. "No one likes to do it. Frequently it doesn't work. And you don't necessarily -- by definition of the process -- get back all the data you need." On the other hand, adds Aronson, CDP promises seamless backup, seamless recovery and virtually nonexistent administrative overhead.
But to implement CDP requires a major shift in focus: from thinking about backup as a time-based action to an event-based one, according to Karp. With traditional backup methods and supporting technologies, data copying is instigated according to a predefined schedule. This could be every week, every night or every hour, depending on the needs of your business. However, with CDP, every time you make a change to data, that "event" triggers the change to be copied incrementally onto the backup device. Later on, if you want to recover a previous version of that data, you scan through the data -- using the "recovery" interface provided by the CDP application -- and find the precise snapshot of the data that you require. (article continues)
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