Continuous Data Protection:
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 Continuous 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.
Protecting Applications Today with continuous data protection:
The days when a daily backup provided adequate continuously protect data 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?
In fact, a November 2003 Gartner report emphasizes that by 2006 the focus of continuous data protection technologies will be on recovery time and that traditional backup technologies and replication-based technologies will merge into a single market by 2005. Continuous Continuous data protection technology does provide a solution suited to the problem, in particular, a continuous Continuous data protection capability that provides the ability to quickly roll back data not just to the last snapshot or backup, but to any point in time, so that only operations actually involved in the crash or corruption need be lost.
Requirements for an Effective Continuous Data Protection Solution
When selecting a continuous data protection product as part of an overall application protection strategy, it is important to remember that a technology is not itself a solution to a business problem - it is only, at best, a component of a solution.
