Before You Buy CDP Solutions

· Are your servers or transaction environments so active that you need point-in-time recoverability? If not, overnight tape backup or 15-minute snapshots may provide sufficient granularity.

· Identify recovery-time objectives (duration to restore; tolerance to delay) and recovery-point objectives (pinpoint specific hardware failure; isolate attachment-borne e-mail virus). These will also help you weigh CDP vs. other backup options.

· Calculate your downtime costs. Doing so will make it easier to cost-justify a big-ticket expenditure like CDP or, conversely, reject it as overkill.

· Which servers, databases and applications are absolutely mission-critical to your organization? Don't just consider lost revenue, but also the loss of customer goodwill or damage to your brand. There could also be life-and-death implications with some medical applications, which are infamous for spanning multiple databases--a backup nightmare.

· Ferret out the hidden costs. If you don't have a SAN, you may have to build one; if you have one, you may need to augment it for redundancy or to improve fault tolerance. Find out what hardware components you'll need to duplicate.