A novel block-level continuous data protection system

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) techniques have received great interest both from academia and industry in recent years. Aiming at the challenges to design and implement a CDP system, this paper proposes GSP_BCDP: a novel continuous data protection architecture at block level. Compared with other approaches, it uses a global shared storage pool to actually store all the versions of data contents, and each version of each logical volume bonded with a restore index table. The recovery of GSP_BCDP is per volume basis, rather than per block basis in other schemes, so GSP_BCDP can provide a much faster version restore than others. Furthermore, through global data de-duplication techniques, GSP_BCDP can not only reduce the duplications along the history of the same data stream, but also de-duplicate the redundancies among data streams or identities between different users. Experimental results demonstrate that GSP_BCDP can improve the recovery time up to more than 10 times, and with storage space compression ratio of 1.2 times in average.