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Simon Lewis

Continuous data protection ensures the last clean copy of a corrupt file or database can be preserved

CONVENTIONAL backup technologies are no longer sufficient to protect enterprises' most critical asset - data - in today's fast-moving business world.

To ensure every change in the system is recorded, a new data backup product, continuous data protection (CDP), recently entered the local market.

Unlike conventional backup, which stores data once a week or once a day, CDP does not have a backup schedule. It constantly captures changes in the systems, allowing data to be restored at any time.

EMC Hong Kong recently entered the CDP market with a product called RecoverPoint.

'CDP captures and preserves a record of every transaction,' general manager Gabriel Leung said. 'The advantage of CDP is that if a file or database becomes corrupted, and the problem is not detected for some time, CDP makes it possible to recover the most recent clean copy of the affected file or database.'

Aiming to minimise the amount of data lost and provide a speedy return to service, the technology allows data to be written on another disk immediately after it is written on the server. Because it is constantly monitoring and backing up data, CDP makes it possible to recover the most recent clean copy of the affected file or data, enabling an IT administrator to decide a precise transaction point for recovery.

Also CDP uses disk storage, further accelerating the recovery to a matter of seconds.

'The data that customers can recover is more recent - possibly down to a few seconds - than with any conventional data recovery method,' Mr Leung said.

However, despite its ability to hasten the recovery process, CDP is not a substitute for existing business continuity applications, he said.

Enterprises will continue to require data to be fully backed up in conventional ways for disaster recovery purposes for archive. Despite the arrival of CDP, there will also continue to be a place in the market for remote replication systems, which have sophisticated capabilities to automatically switch over to a backup system when there is a system failure.

'CDP is best where data often changes and the amount of stored data is large, or the lost and damaged data presents a significant business risk,' he said.

Using technology from Mendocino Software, EMC's RecoverPoint is expected to be available in Hong Kong by the end of  this month as part of a phased product release. Mr Leung said RecoverPoint provided application-centric data protection with the broadest support of applications and operating systems.

'Most of today's CDP products are either tightly integrated with a single application, or they have no application awareness at all,' he said.

'RecoverPoint is like having a surveillance camera trained on your data. Whenever data changes it is captured. Just choose the 'frame from the film' from which you'd like to recover,' Mr Leung said.

Microsoft and Symantec have also recently introduced similar products in their portfolio.

Symantec's Backup Exec 10d provides CDP for Windows Server applications. It also provides Web-based end-user file retrieval functionality, allowing business users to retrieve their files without IT intervention.

Symantec data management group senior vice-president Jeremy Burton  said: 'We also improve productivity by allowing the retrieval of files through a simple Web browser interface. This allows IT to devote resources and time to business critical needs, and allows end-users to retrieve files immediately.'

Microsoft's near-continuous application Data Protection Manager (DPM) takes periodic snapshots of data. DPM can save up to eight snapshots of data off Windows servers during the day.

Senior vice-president of Windows server division Bob Muglia  said: 'Backup has been the bane of IT professionals for decades. Disk-based data protection provides a revolution in providing continuous backup and fast recovery of data. DPM will help usher in this new era of disk-based data protection.'



CDP records all changes in the system to restore at will