Survey Sheds Light on Continuous Data Protection Usage
Popular for reporting, audits, and compliance, but 42 percent of respondents have no plans to implement CDP
Santa Barbara, California, November 29, 2006 -- A recent end-user survey conducted by Peripheral Concepts, Inc. reveals that 80 percent of the continuous data protection (CDP) implementations are also used to create copies of production data for reporting, audits, and other compliance-related requirements.
The number of sites with CDP implementations has grown from 34 percent last year to 43 percent. Company plans for 2007 show that 28 percent of the population will either implement it for the first time or extend its utilization, leaving 42 percent with no plans to implement.
What differentiates CDP from traditional backup and recovery techniques is its ability to provide near-instantaneous restoration to virtually any point in time without having to physically move or copy data. A majority of respondents rank data protection highest among their storage management challenges, and data recovery stands out as the major related problem for 40 percent of the respondents, with recovery objectives (RTO and RPO) of less than 20 minutes
While many continue to use snapshots, one-third of users estimate CDP more apt to cover their needs, with enterprise resource planning (ERP) the most common CDP application. The survey examines IT managers’ preferences between block, file and application CDP.
CDP is transforming business continuity while greatly simplifying the data protection process, easing the administrator’s burden and ensuring compliance with SLAs and best practices. The Return on Investment (ROI) is estimated to be less than two years by 61 percent of respondents.
The survey addressed a random population of 30,000 sites; 4,150 reliable responses form the basis of preliminary findings covering servers, storage configurations, and implementation plans. For a selected population of over 100 IT professionals, this report provides statistics on data protection practices, ranks issues and needs, and analyzes CDP applications and plans.
PERIPHERAL CONCEPTS, Inc. is a leading consulting firm specializing in storage and storage management. For more information, see the Reports section of http://www.periconcepts.com