As a direct result of this way of looking at their data, I.T. teams have intuitively grasped that what they now require of their data protection solution is the ability to recover verifiably correct data corresponding to any and all of these production tiers; to create, in effect, ‘recovery tiers’. This is leading businesses to develop data protection strategies that involve aligning the right kind of data protection technology with the appropriate data sets to deliver an optimal recovery schema for the company and all its data. And, in just the same way as for storage tiers, recovery profiles for different recovery tiers vary by criteria that include frequency, speed, granularity, application integration and geography.

The Taneja Group has suggested that this approach may be described as Recovery Lifecycle Management (RLM) - clearly capitalising on the widespread understanding of ILM to generate immediate comprehension of this new approach to data protection. The rapid advances in data protection technologies over the last three years means that the solutions available to build the optimal recovery schema for any given business certainly now exist. The technologies include:

• the relatively new concept of continuous data protection (CDP), for creating point-in-time recovery images of specific mission critical datasets – typically email and databases.
• virtual tape libraries (VTL), enabling the creation of a high-speed disk-staging capability for current, but not critical data.
• replication to a disk platform at a secondary site, ready for remote access by the primary site in the event of catastrophic data loss at the primary site.
• and vaulting, for old data that needs to be archived and retained, perhaps in case it may one day be needed for reference, or simply for compliance reasons.

CDP is the process whereby data is captured and replicated to a separate storage location to ensure that a set of critical data is always available. The point of CDP is to minimise data loss by providing rapid data recovery, to any point in time, with minimal downtime. However, the relatively high cost of CDP means it is only truly appropriate for optimising the backup and recovery of genuinely critical data – for Exchange email servers, for example. The particular value of CDP is its ability to restore ‘hot’ production data – say, up to seven days old - to any point within a specific time interval.

But customers also require of their data protection solutions suitable levels of protection for ‘warm’ data – say, up to six months old.


Space-efficient delta snapshots enable production data to be restored to a pre-defined moment in time with guaranteed data integrity, at a granularity of perhaps every two hours. These snapshots can be retained for, say, three months.