Market Analysis: Data Do-Over

摘要

The latest three-letter acronym to shake up the storage world is CDP. Continuous data protection products let IT recover a current version of a file— and with some offerings, e-mail messages or database transactions-in the wake of an accidental deletion or corruption. Some purists insist that to be called CDP, a product must provide infinite restore points. We say, stop misusing the term infinite and focus on what matters: Getting the business up and running after a mishap with minimal data loss. As we discuss in "Data Do-Over," we consider products that replicate data to a backup repository in real time, then take periodic snapshots, worthy of the CDP moniker because they provide comprehensive protection, and that's what it's all about. Pseu-do-CDP products, defined as those that don't send changes to the backup repository in real time but instead use, for example, a snapshot-then-export model, beat nightly backups even though you could lose a few minutes of data.