Traditional backup systems provide a critical layer of insurance, but they represent all-or-nothing strategies that do not cover the minute by minute daily data writes to the disk. Continuous data protection fills in this gap by capturing changes to data while users are working. In the event of a data interruption, administrators can automatically reconstitute the data in reverse order to a point before it was corrupted or lost.
Business and IT Requirements for Continuous Data Protection Protecting Information Assets with Enterprise Rewinder September 2004 Table of Contents Executive Summary ................................................................................................. 3 Protecting Applications Today .................................................................................... 4 Requirements for an Effective Solution ........................................................................ 5 A High-Level Overview of the Enterprise Rewinder System............................................. 7 Normal Operation of the System ................................................................................ 8 Managing and Monitoring the System.......................................................................... 9 Digging Down: What Makes Enterprise Rewinder Distinctive ........................................ 10 Seamless Integration With Your Environment............................................................. 10 Ease of Management with Complete Control............................................................... 11 Installation Without Pain ......................................................................................... 13 Real Application-Aware Protection From Corrupted and Inconsistent Information............. 14 Simple and Fast Recovery ....................................................................................... 14 Cost-Effectiveness and Verifiability ........................................................................... 15 Summary of Enterprise Rewinder Advantages ............................................................ 16 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 17 Other XOsoft Products ............................................................................................ 17 About the Author ................................................................................................... 18 About XOsoft......................................................................................................... 18
Executive Summary
Software and user errors are estimated to cause 80% of all unplanned downtime. A significant percentage of these errors occur predictably, during database maintenance or batch processing activities. Traditional data protection systems like RAID, tape backups and snapshots provide a critical layer of insurance, but they represent all-or-nothing strategies that cannot prevent the loss of potentially hours of valid, valuable data prior to an error. New continuous data protection systems fill in this gap by allowing data to be restored to an arbitrary point in time, thus providing a solution that is well targeted to the actual problem. An adequate continuous data protection and recovery system must, however, meet several key requirements, including simplicity, cost-effectiveness, application-awareness, flexibility and high performance. We present a detailed description of the Enterprise Rewinder architecture and operation, demonstrating that it has been carefully engineered not just to meet the minimum requirements, but even to set new standards for ease of operation and management. In addition, Enterprise Rewinder offers some unique capabilities, including installation without any downtime and strong application-awareness.
Continuous Data Protection Page 3 Enterprise Rewinder
Protecting Applications Today
The days when a daily backup provided adequate protection for a business's critical processes are long gone. Today, downtime, any downtime, translates to real and significant costs, in lost productivity because employees can't work, lost business because orders can't be taken, and customer dissatisfaction as your downtime translates to their downtime. A recent study of 80 large organizations by Infonetics Research found that overall downtime costs averaged an astounding 3.6% of annual revenue. Can you afford that kind of bite out of your margins? Well over half of all downtime is unplanned. Of that, 80% is due to software and user errors: unknown and irreproducible bugs, accidental deletion or configuration changes, batch jobs corrupting important data, and errors from the use of hard-to-understand management tools. More importantly, many of these occur at predictable times,... [download for more]
