Tag: cdp

W. Curtis Preston recently posted a blog entry in response to my earlier post entitled Will dedicated VMware protection solutions go the way of CDP. Curtis clearly had strong opinions on the issue and his thorough write-up is appreciated.  I think that there is a disconnect here and wanted to clarify my thoughts.

I agree with Curtis’s detailed analysis of CDP technology, but my point was simply that three years ago CDP was hot.  Regardless of whether, there were 5 or 5,000 customers, the technology was the talk of the industry.  At the time, new CDP vendors were frequently appearing and existing companies were trying to position their solutions as “CDP-like”.  The hype machine was in full motion and it spanned the industry.

I previously posted a survey highlighting the different methods of protecting VMware environments.  The responses suggested that host-based backup is the predominant approach.  The least popular choice was “Dedicated VMware backup application (Veeam, Vizioncore, etc..)”.  These solutions exclusively protect virtual environments and they remind me of continuous data protection (CDP) technologies from the past.

Three years ago, CDP was hot.  It was a major industry buzzword and several companies were founded focusing exclusively on technologies that claimed to enable CDP functionality.  CDP enabled instantaneous backup, recovery and roll-back of critical data and some predicted that it would replace traditional data protection.  CDP upstarts made voluminous statements about the technology and the future, but they had miniscule installed bases particularly when compared to the traditional backup application vendors.  The challenge for the CDP providers was convincing end users to replace or augment existing backup infrastructures.  This was a challenge since end users had substantial investments in backup software, hardware and knowledge.  Although CDP provided customer value, it was only practical as a complementary solution to traditional backup and CDP functionality should have been embedded in existing backup applications.  As a result, most dedicated CDP companies were either bought or went away, and we now see backup ISVs including CDP functionality.