Just two years ago it looked like Continuous Data Protection might actually replace the weekly full backup, nightly incremental backup tedium that's ruled the data center since T.Rex walked the earth. Microsoft's Data Protection Manager endorsed the concept, but was so limited it did more to open the market for other players like TimeSpring and FilesX than box them out. At the high end, Revivio, Mendocino Software, and Kaysha had Fibre Channel appliances that would split off writes to even the busiest database and journal them without putting a load on the database server. I even wrote a comparative review.Today, despite an OEM agreement with HP to provide the core of its Storageworks CIC, it appears that Mendocino Software has joined Revivio (bought by Symantec/Veritas and the technology disapeared) and TimeSpring (bought recently by Double-Take software at a bargain price) on the CDP junk pile.

Repeated calls and e-mails to marketing folks and general numbers and addresses have gone unanswered for more than a week. Last I checked, tech support was still answering the phone.

It seems that CDP isn't a product, it's a feature. Adding CDP brings great value to replication, application failover, and even conventional backup applications, but another server, console, agent and set of nomenclature is just too much for most storage geeks.

So CDP (the product) is dead, long live CDP (the feature).