Byte & Switch’s Mary Jander has an interesting article about the evolution of CDP from product to feature. What is interesting is not that CDP is a feature, it is that

In recent news, Mimosa made CDP part of its NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange Server archiving package. (See Mimosa Adds Migration.) Mendocino and Revivio are touting tighter integration that puts CDP at the service of specific enterprise applications. FalconStor, Kashya, and others are linking CDP more tightly with SAN replicators. (See Users Push for CDP Shapeshift .)

Not only is everyone running to the exits, they are all running to different exits. Think this through with me.

Continuous Data Protection is a Good Thing. It allows you to recover to any arbitrary time period. So if your database burps all over your data and corrupts it, you can recover to the second just before the burp. Great stuff.

So why would you want to, for instance, limit CDP to a particular application? SAN replicator? Why wouldn’t you just want to have a continuous rolling CDP window that covered everything on each server?

Instead, if everyone’s exit fantasies come off (they won’t, of course), you could end up with 3 or more CDP products on a server, all with different interfaces and slightly different feature sets and terminology.

Given that the window for CDP success seems to be closing rapidly, I’d suggest a Hail Mary strategy for one of the players: take a 99% price reduction; go to online marketing, delivery and service; fire the sales organization and all the on-site service people; and go for market share.

In almost every other aspect of infrastructure volume drives solutions into the data center. A suitably hungry CDP vendor could do that and overcome the “feature” problem. At $50k, its a feature. At $500, it’s a utility.