In his review of CDP then and now in Storage Magazine this month, W. Curtis Preston writes that CDP then was kind of like Star Trek: a great idea too far ahead of its time. The article, “Continuous data protection; it's back!”, details the industry’s first pass at CDP. Dominated by start-ups and unproven technologies, the CDP field of old left enterprises unimpressed.
Oh, how times do change.
Recently, I joined Craig Peterson on his weekly podcast, Tech Talk with Craig Peterson, to discuss the ever-changing world of disaster recovery, disk storage and data protection.
My time on the show allowed me to reflect on the dramatic changes we’ve seen in data protection and data recovery since they became hot button issues thirty years ago. Data protection used to involve backing up data on tape drives, which would then be shipped off-site for storage, on a nightly basis. If something were to happen on-site where data needed to be recovered, users would be limited to a snapshot of what happened yesterday. They would lose any data created since the previous day’s data had been stored the night before.
In today’s fast-paced world, this method of data protection and recovery would not suffice as organizations, especially small-to-medium businesses, cannot afford to lose any data. Luckily, advancements in technology have provided us with more effective and efficient means of storing and recovering data.
As our FalconStor blog surfers know, one of the topics we frequently discuss is continuous data protection (CDP), which is a process that allows users to restore data to any point in time, as computer data is constantly backed up by trickling all data changes made to an off-site, virtual location. This data is fully protected in the event of an IT issue on-site, and is immediately available for recall.
Even with its steep cost, CDP adds a great deal of value to a user or an organization. For business, it gives management the peace of mind the data surrounding their transactions will always be there. As I noted in the podcast, this is especially important given that recent studies show nine out of 10 businesses who cannot recover data after 10 days go out of business. For hospitals and the healthcare industry, having 24/7 date data can literally mean the difference between life and death. For college students, CDP gives them a backup copy of their final project if their laptop hard drive is erased the morning it is due.
So what’s the catch? Data protection has come a long way, and we at FalconStor are proud to be offering our resellers and customers a solution that helps them though the new age of data protection. Innovative data protection and recovery processes have given users the assurance they need regarding the safety and ability to recall data, resulting in a paradigm shift from a data backup mindset to one of data recovery.
Can you tell us about your recent stories of migrating from tape to CDP?
As IT and business managers are well aware, data replication can quickly increase bandwidth and storage costs if you aren’t careful. Wide area network (WAN) optimization can help you reduce the amount of bandwidth and storage capacity used by data replication, enabling cost savings while maintaining efficient application performance.
Remote replication can also improve the backup process and shrink the backup window to virtually nothing. We see many organizations taking snapshots of their data, replicating it to a remote location and completing the backup-to-tape process from the remote site. The primary site, and associated business applications, are effectively insulated from any backup process disruption – eliminating downtime, and the backup window.
If your organization is still using tape backup, you have a relatively reliable and affordable data protection method – especially for long-term protection. However, as your data volumes grow and your dependence on data availability increases, the limitations of tape media will become severe.
Perhaps you are already struggling with this and considering the pros and cons of moving away from tape-based backup.