Storage Area Networks For Dummies®

Chapter 14. Continuous Data Protection

In this chapter, you find out how to use recent innovations in data protection to make protecting your data easier and more efficient. Continuous data protection enables you to shift your focus from backing up your data to recovering data faster and more efficiently and, perhaps, avoid the possibility of data loss all together.

Understanding What Continuous Data Protection Is

With CDP (Continuous Data Protection), your data is always protected, so you don't need to do backups. CDP can protect every write to a disk, so it's one of the only solutions that can protect your applications from any data loss and can rapidly recover your applications from disk. Because everything is continually protected to disk instead of tape, CDP greatly enhances your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is one of the more interesting recent advances in SAN technologies for backing up data. With traditional backup solutions, the backup process is performed once or twice a day at the most, and therefore can only provide the ability to recover data to one or two specific points in time. A traditional backup process can take a long time to complete, because it has to move data from one place to another (either to tape or another disk). CDP is different than backup, because there is no backup process, and there is no bulk data movement that must occur. CDP is just always on, like a service.

The amount of time ...