IBM Brings CDP Home

Continuous data protection (CDP), originally developed to guarantee the highest level of backup and restore reliability for critical enterprise data, is now a retail technology for homes and small businesses.

IBM says it is making IBM Continuous Data Protection for Files available through online retailers such as Circuit City, CompUSA, and Staples through a distribution agreement with Digital River. IBM's software costs $35 per laptop or desktop PC.

When IBM launched CDP for Files last August, its target audience was laptop users in large corporations. (See IBM Hops CDP Bus.) But Chris Stakutis, CTO for IBM's CDP, says Big Blue has come to see it as a high-volume home application that combines security and backup. Stakutis envisions the Digital River deal making IBM's CDP a companion to antivirus as a method of securing data on home PCs.

IBM anticipates individuals and small businesses using the CDP package to back up data to online servers through a broadband service provider, or to a server or USB drive in the home or office.

"We built [CDP for Files] for our traditional market, the enterprise," Stakutis says. "But we built it for the enterprise end user, not for IT staff. So we said, 'Hey, anybody could use this.' "While today's announcement is mostly a distribution deal, IBM added AES128 encryption, improved the compression, and gussied up the interface for personal users.

Stakutis says security becomes more important when dealing with individuals or small businesses.

"In the corporate environment, encryption isn't much of an issue for this product," he says. "It's usually running on tethered workstations in a corporate facility or employed by roaming remote users going through a VPN. But we ran into pushback from customers who said they wanted to send the data to servers in public areas. They dont want the company hosting their data looking over the fence."

As its name implies, CDP for Files handles only files and does not back up block-level data or applications such as Exchange or databases. Stakutis says IBM may eventually move upstream into enterprise CDP, but the vendor sees the early market on the low end.

"Would we morph this into block-level CDP? There's a chance," he says. "We are monitoring that market like everybody else in storage. But I'm not convinced the market is there yet. You're limited to customers with strict recovery needs who won't find frequent snapshots adequate."Gartner analyst David Russell says his firm doesn't break out CDP revenue from overall backup, but he says his research indicates CDP is more prevalent in low-end products. Along with IBM, he says Symantec Backup Exec10d, Atempo LiveBackup for PCs, TimeSpring TimeData, and Mimosa NearPoint for Exchange have gained traction with companies looking to protect Windows files and Exchange.

Still, Russell sees CDP eventually settling into the enterprise. Startups Revivio and Mendocino Software target the enterprise, while EMC, Hewlett-Packard, and CA have added CDP to their enterprise backup products through acquisitions or partnerships. (See Current Comms Raises $130M, HP Picks Mendocino , and CA Buys XOsoft.)

"The ultimate resting point for this technology would be high-transaction mainframe systems where you can't afford to lose any data and you need instant recovery points," Russell says. "Right now, we see more than 80 percent of the use in Windows files and in some cases Exchange. In four or five years, we're projecting that inverts to where we see SAP on Oracle and products like that being protected."

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch