Time to read: 2 minutes, 7 seconds | Published: April 10th, 2025
Continuous data protection What is continuous data protection?
Continuous data protection (CDP) provides granular recovery to within seconds of data that can go back seconds or years as needed. The option to recover to many more granular points in time minimizes data loss to seconds, dramatically reducing the impact of outages and disruptions to your organization.
Continuous data protection is a protection mechanism that allows organizations to continuously capture and track data changes, automatically saving every version of the data that the user creates locally or at a target repository.
With CDP, writes are saved to a journal file along with the corresponding file changes. CDP allows users or administrators the ability to restore data to any point in time with remarkable granularity.
Why choose continuous data protection (CDP)?
Continuous data protection utilizes journal-based technology to keep a log of all the changes occurring in a specified time frame, offering any point-in-time recovery in increments of seconds for the entire length of the journal.
Unlike legacy systems, which accumulate data periodically throughout the day and then attempt to complete a backup during a time window, CDP constantly backs up your data.
For example, snapshot-based recovery puts your business at risk of higher data loss due to infrequent restore points that are captured, while CDP minimizes this with thousands of restore points throughout the journal history.
CDP offers the insurance of minimal operational impact in the event of an outage —whether natural or man-made— and is therefore a great solution for disaster recovery and ransomware recovery use cases requiring the lowest downtime and data loss.
HPE and continuous data protection (CDP)
What does HPE offer for continuous data protection?
HPE Zerto Software offers effective data protection for business applications and data, including:
- Real-time block-level replication. HPE Zerto continuous data protection utilizes change-block tracking to constantly replicate data as it is written to storage.
- No performance impact. With HPE Zerto continuous data protection, the journal is only used until the point in time is selected, without the performance impact of many snapshots.
- Journal-based, any point-in-time recovery. Journal-based recovery keeps a constant log of all the changes users make to applications and data.
- Enterprise scalability. Place the journal on any datastore with maximum size limits and warnings, preventing the datastore from filling, which would otherwise break replication.
- Storage savings. HPE Zerto continuous data protection uses no extra space in the source storage as no snapshots are created. Only 7-10 percent of the target storage is used, which frees up significant amounts of space and results in dramatic savings.
- Ransomware recovery down to the second. In the event of ransomware or other malicious attacks, recover data to just seconds before the corruption took place, minimizing the impact to business.
What makes HPE Zerto Software unique?
HPE Zerto delivers continuous data protection (CDP) with near-zero data loss and downtime, ensuring rapid recovery from ransomware, disasters, and disruptions. Its seamless mobility across on-prem, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments simplifies migrations and resilience strategies. With automated failover, testing, and orchestration, HPE Zerto eliminates complexity and maximizes IT resilience.
