Continuous data protection (CDP) seems attractive for people who want to speed backup and recovery times, but are you seeing any increase in adoption?
It depends on your definition of CDP. If you are asking about the textbook (SNIA) definition for CDP, I really have not seen it take off the way that it could have — mostly because the purist definition implies transactional recovery.
If you use the layman’s definition of continually replicating data for fast resumption of service, I am a huge fan. That would include application-centric approaches like SQL database mirroring or Exchange database availability groups — or third-party methods like DoubleTake.
In those approaches, you are continuously protecting data (lowercase cdp or near-CDP) which allows for near immediate resumption of service, as well as some interesting offloaded backup capabilities. These are not true-CDP offerings because they don’t always provide that granular “per-transaction”rollback, but make no mistake, they are continuously protecting data.
All of these CDP solutions offer near-immediate recovery capabilities of snapshot rollback — but from a second server that is often geographically separated from the original. And that is a compelling scenario.
[Originally posted on TechTarget as a recurring columnist]