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Well-publicized disasters highlight the need for an effective and timely data recovery solution. While current tape and disk backup provide some peace of mind, they do not keep up with the demands placed on your business. You cannot afford to wait hours (or days) to recover your critical applications and data. To reduce recovery time, you might implement local or remote volume replication. Remote replication protects your data from a major disaster or outage at the primary location. However, it usually does not provide complete recovery of all your data. You must make a best guess as to when to create point-in-time images. Thus data that was created or changed between the time the image was taken and the time a disaster occurs will not be included. This data is either lost or, if you are lucky, must be rebuilt from transaction logs. A server failure, while not disastrous on a grand scale, also prevents access to your data. Whereas remote volume replication protects against major disasters, it does not provide the best option for recovery for a local outage such as this. You must be able to rapidly restore all your data to minimize missed revenue opportunities. Continuous data protection (CDP) solutions offer quick recovery from any point in time to effectively address this need.
Complete data protection and recovery solutions will provide multiple levels of protection, including remote replication for major outages and CDP for any-pointin- time (APIT) recovery. This strategy allows for data to be back online in a matter of seconds to minutes instead of hours or days, while simultaneously being protected from major disaster.
Xiotech Corporation's TimeScale? 200 Series systems provide easy-to-use, real-time CDP for recovery to any point in time. The TimeScale 300 Series also provides CDP but adds asynchronous replication to protect you from geographic site disasters. These flexible, scalable solutions enable you to proactively protect and, more importantly, recover your data?while reducing your total cost of data protection.
Continuous Data Protection
CDP changes the focus of data protection plans from backup to recovery. By continually journaling all mission-critical changed data, it enables fast, easy data recovery following any type of outage. CDP is a relatively new term but is already being widely publicized with different meanings. True CDP solutions follow the definition of the Storage Networking Industry Organization (SNIA):
All data changes from the source server are continuously tracked or journaled, allowing rollback to an unlimited number of change points. For an effective CDP solution, the data changes are stored in a separate location, typically another server.
CDP is not snapshot technology. Creating predefined schedules for snapshots and then exporting them to another system is not continuous; thus, it cannot be considered a CDP solution. Exporting data to another system and then creating a snapshot addresses the
requirement for a separate location but does not provide rollback to any point in time.
CDP offers more flexible recovery points and faster recovery times than traditional data protection solutions. It does this by providing access to data at any point in time, thereby reducing data loss and eliminating costly downtime. Data retrieval is reliable, fast, and granular.
TimeScale 200
Xiotech's TimeScale 200 Series is an easy to use CDP solution for Microsoft? Windows? 2003 environments. This flexible and scalable CDP solution allows you to recover your data in either an application consistent state or from any point in time. The TimeScale 200 solution leverages your existing infrastructure to attain unprecedented cost savings without sacrificing performance or features. Additionally, TimeScale 200 enables centralized management and offloads CPUintensive tasks such as compression and encryption.
The TimeScale 200 Series architecture allows you to start with just a single appliance and perform CDP at either the local or remote site, or even both. The architecture further lets you deploy CDP locally while deploying asynchronous remote replication (with the TimeScale 300 Series). TimeScale 200 can also be architected to provide CDP for other purposes. For example a development group may create an image of a production Microsoft SQL or Oracle? database from any previous point in time so that application changes can be tested prior to its final deployment.
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