Backup Exec™'s Project 'Panther' Beta (page 1 of 2)

CDP is an emerging application class that is gaining daily mindshare as it evolves. VERITAS's new CDP offering, Backup Exec™ Panther Beta, comprises a new, powerful tool for helping Windows-based organization take advantage of this revolution in data protection and improve overall business continuity. Backup Exec™ "Panther" Beta pres-ently is targeted for Windows®-based file server environments.

Business Continuity Imperative

As a data-storage specialist, you undoubtedly realize enterprise data's importance - no business data, no business. Within contemporary business environments, however, you also know that business critical data is increasingly under siege from unauthorized access attempts, viruses, worms, Trojan horse-wares, device failures as well as user errors stemming from data and complexity growth. Moreover, toss in regulatory compliance from Sarbanes-Oxley as just one example, along with mandated litigation discovery re-sponse times, and the opportunity for integrating computer security and storage becomes clear.

• Security helps protect against unauthorized access.
• Storage provisioning, including effective back/recovery facilities, helps negate user errors and remedy storage subsystem device failures.

So, it's no surprise that on February 23, 2005, the Storage Networking Industry Associa-tion (SNIA) Data Management Forum (DMF) announced the formation of a Continuous Data Protection special interest group within the Data Protection Initiative (DPI). This recent action reflects the reality that data protection technologies have evolved from sim-ple operations to advanced techniques like mirroring, snap-shots, remote replication, dis-aster recovery and archiving.

Continuous Data Protection special interest group founding members are industry leaders in the field of continuous data protection. The group's mission is to unify develop and promote standardized terminology to describe the technology, practices, and features of data protection. The group will also develop the technical requirements for a CDP data services interface standard within the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S).

The good news here is that business continuity is likely going to be a business require-ment for the foreseeable future, providing constantly-evolving challenges that require ex-pertise and skill to resolve. The other news is that, after providing data network protec-tion, there are many other requirements that must be addressed, hence, CDP.

CDP Requirements

The purpose of CDP is to ensure crash and user error immunity for system and user data at the client, server, and enterprise level. This must be accomplished in a way that:

• Has a design elasticity that can support environments ranging from 24x7x365 to 8x5 operational requirements
• Compliments existing infrastructure resources
• Preserves investments in existing products
• Is intuitive to use to protect server and client files
• Has default strategies that administrators can easily supplement with customized, policy-based strategies
• Enables fine-grained file recovery at the file, server, or enterprise LAN level
• Provides high performance initial configuration
• Meets or exceeds operational performance expectations for small file protection and recovery as well as large, multi-gigabyte file protection and recovery
• Enables off-site recovery when applicable
• Is economical to implement through minimum infrastructure hardware upgrades
• Enables client users to recover from errors without IT administration involvement
• Provides IT administration with a familiar console

This is a rather daunting list of requirements which are made even more complex by the unforgiving nature of data compliance and legal discovery statutes, not to mention the fact that different data and operating systems have different management requirements and operational characteristics.