What is Continuous Data Protection?
Continuous data protection (CDP) is a technology that provides data protection for mission-critical VMware virtual machines, ensuring that data loss is minimized even for short periods of time, making it an ideal solution when even seconds or minutes of downtime are unacceptable. By maintaining replicas in a ready-to-start state, CDP guarantees minimal recovery time objectives (RTO) in the event of a disaster.
CDP is responsible for generating replicas of data and then ensures these replicas are continuously updated to reflect the latest changes in the original data.
CDP (Continuous Data Protection) is designed to continuously replicate all input/output operations performed on virtual machines. CDP leverages vSphere APIs for I/O filtering (VAIO) to handle and analyze I/O operations moving between secure virtual machines and their corresponding data storage, enabling the bypass of snapshot creation. CDP, being perpetually active and avoiding snapshot creation, enables achieving a significantly lower recovery point objective (RPO) compared to the snapshot-based replication method. This near-zero RPO translates to minimal data loss, making CDP highly effective in minimizing data loss during recovery.
The target datastore stores data related to I/O operations, which is specifically used for short-term restore points. Short-term restore points, which can be configured to recover a VM to a state within seconds or minutes (depending on the specified Recovery Point Objective - RPO), provide a rapid recovery option for virtual machines in the event of a disaster. Information about short-term restore points is maintained in a special journal. This journal is used to keep track of short-term restore points, which are stored for a maximum period of 24 hours. For restoring a VM to an earlier state, Veeam Backup & Replication provides the option to create supplementary restore points that capture the VM's status at different times, giving you the ability to revert to a state from hours or days in the past. These kinds of restore points are called long-term restore points, as they are designed for long-term storage and retrieval.
Veeam Backup & Replication enhances traffic transmission to enable efficient replication even over slow connections. It optimizes data transmission by eliminating unnecessary data blocks, including duplicates and zeros, while compressing replicated data.