Revivio Turns SAS Onto CDP

SAS is the type of customer the major backup vendors have in mind for CDP -- even though startup Revivio got to the maker of business intelligence software long before CommVault, EMC, HP, IBM, and Veritas (now part of Symantec) entered the game.

SAS has adopted Revivio's CDP as one part of enterprise data protection, but not the entire answer. (See EMC Pulls Forward With Backup and HP Picks Mendocino .) According to Buster Catelloe, manager of open systems infrastructure technology at SAS, the concept of CDP intrigued his group a year ago, long before the technology began to catch on with established storage software players.

Castelloe wanted more protection for his most important applications. We have business critical databases as part of our human resources, financial, and payroll systems,” Castelloe says. “We were taking hourly snaps, but that didn’t give us the granularity we needed for recoverability. Rather than spending a boatload of money on more disk, we went for CDP.” After several months of evaluating Revivio’s Continuous Protection System (CPS 1200) appliance, SAS recently became a customer. (See Revivio Shows Database Restoration .)

CDP captures all of the changes made to data and allows users to restore any good version of a document or application in case of a system or media failure. Backup vendors say CDP has a place alongside snapshot and replication but will never replace those technologies.

Castelloe agrees. SAS already has about 50 TBytes of EMC Clariion and Symmetrix storage and uses EMC’s TimeFinder and SRDF for snapshots and replication. Castelloe turns to Revivio’s appliance to handle only the most mission-critical applications, comprising about 2 TBytes of data. For the applications not picked for CDP, remote replication and tape backup remain part of SAS’s data protection strategy.