5 Important Questions to Ask About Continuous Data Protection (CDP)

For almost 10 years now, Zerto has maintained that the future of backup is continuous, and in over 7,000 Enterprise customer installations, we’ve been using Continuous Data Protection (CDP) in our converged Disaster Recovery and Backup offerings to ensure the lowest, industry-breaking recovery times. There are important differentiators in how Zerto customers utilize CDP that you may want to keep in mind. 

Zerto’s Continuous Data Protection utilizes proven journaling technology that logs all changes that have occurred for up to 30 days – configurable down to the second. CDP and journaling are powerful tools in achieving IT resilience and, combined with Zerto’s automation and orchestration capabilities, allow for large-scale application recovery with zero manual intervention. So, consider asking those who have recently started marketing CDP capabilities:

How fast is their recovery? After all, short recovery time is the whole point of DR, right? 

Others may store CDP files and recovery disks on secondary storage, sized for backup workloads. This means that running any recovery at scale is limited in performance and requires manual intervention by moving these workloads to production-grade storage. This results in higher RTOs and greater risk. 

Does their CDP solution have application–consistency grouping?  

Zerto has the ability to protect and recover multi-VM application stacks in a consistent manner – across all points in time. This helps customers protect not only mission-critical VMs, but also business-critical applications, for both short-term and long-term retention. 

Can they do CDP at scale? 

Zerto’s software-defined scale-out architecture delivers RPOs of seconds at any scale, without the need to architect dedicated hardware appliances or other components that require complex sizing.  

How does their CDP run in the Cloud? 

Zerto offers CDP on VMware environments and allows mobility and protection to, from and between Microsoft Azure, AWS, IBM Cloud or any of Zerto’s 350+ Cloud Service Providers 

Do they provide built-in orchestration for recovery? 

Zerto removes the complexity of manual processes – making recovery simpler and more straightforward. There are no requirements for scripting or changes to scripts (scripts quickly become outdated) due to changes in the environment, hardware or software.  

See how the Zerto Platform checks off all of the 5 “must haves” for CDP in this whitepaper.