How to Use Continuous Data Protection to Improve Backup, Disaster Recovery

Not all CDP solutions are created equal

When choosing a CDP solution, it is important to consider your organization's business needs and objectives to ascertain which product will provide the highest business value. If cost is an issue, you need a solution that integrates with your existing infrastructure.

You need it to offer offer centralized management and reporting to reduce management overhead. Compression and data reduction minimizes storage requirements, allowing you to store more data with less hardware.

If your organization struggles to meet backup windows, then backup acceleration through backup software integration is an ideal way to increase tape backup speed, while offloading processing from application servers. WAN optimization further accelerates backup by minimizing network bandwidth requirements for replication, reducing them by as much as 90 percent.

Businesses that want to improve SLAs benefit from CDP solutions that provide application-aware snapshots, which provide the fastest possible recovery with the highest possible levels of granularity. They eliminate the need to perform time-consuming bare-metal restores.

While all CDP technologies offer advantages over traditional data protection mechanisms, only the most sophisticated CDP solutions provide features that ensure instant availability of critical business applications. The more comprehensive CDP solutions enable rapid and granular recovery in all disaster scenarios to maximize the benefits of this technology.

Bobby Crouch is the Product Marketing Manager at FalconStor Software. He is a 20-year technology industry veteran, with roles ranging from development engineering to sales and marketing. Bobby’s expertise extends from microprocessor architecture, servers, networking, enterprise software and storage. He can be reached at bobby.crouch@falconstor.com.