What is Continuous Data Protection?

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) allows organizations to automatically capture and track data modifications, saving every version of user-created data locally or at a target repository. With little-to-no production overhead, incremental writes are replicated continuously and saved to a journal file. CDP’s change block tracking also allows users or administrators to restore data to any point in time with remarkable granularity.

Real-Time Block-Level Replication

CDP utilizes change-block tracking to constantly replicate data as it is written to storage. Because CDP is always-on, it offers considerably lower Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) than snapshot-based solutions – this means almost no data loss.

Snapshots vs. Continuous Data Protection

Continuous data replication allows organizations to replicate data as changes occur, delivering recovery intervals of mere seconds. Snapshots are scheduled rather than continuous, because of their impact on production, meaning recovery intervals of hours.

Journal-Based Any Point-In-Time Recovery

Journal-based recovery keeps a constant log of all the changes users make to applications and data. Because the changes are continuously written to the datastore, CDP delivers any point-in-time recoverability to within a specified time frame.

No Performance Impact

Storing multiple snapshots on replica VMs incurs a significant performance penalty when attempting to power on replica VMs. Zerto’s continuous data protection uses a journal to commit to a point in time selected for recovery, with no performance impact.

Enterprise Scalability

The journal can be placed on any datastore with maximum size limits and warnings – preventing the datastore from filling which would otherwise break replication. Using snapshots provides no way of controlling the total space used, so snapshot solutions are not scalable in terms of SLAs and efficiency.

Storage Savings

Because no snapshots are created, CDP typically uses just 15% of additional storage, resulting in dramatic savings and significant amounts of free space. Snapshot technologies require significant overhead on storage, often requiring an additional 20-30%.

Storcom is a top Zerto solution provider headquartered in the Chicagoland area in Lombard, IL. We service clients in Naperville, Geneva, Northbrook, Aurora, Joliet, Oak Brook, and many many more.