Kashya Replicates on the Cheap: Page 2 of 4

It doesn’t matter what servers or what storage you have,” says Mehran Hadipour, Kashya’s VP of product marketing. This allows companies to slash their replication costs, he insists, claiming that the appliance offers better performance than a typical host-based replication solution, since it sits out of band and doesn’t drain resources from the host server.

In fact, Kashya contends the appliance can offer performance as high as the subsystem-based products, but at a fraction of the price. One of its main cost-saving measures is bandwidth reduction, the company claims. It achieves this through techniques like algorithmic compression and delta differential, which entails only sending changed bytes of data, instead of sending whole data blocks each time a byte changes.

There are, of course, other network-based replication products already on the market that offer similar performance and cost savings, including products from companies like FalconStor Software Inc. (Nasdaq: FALC) and DataCore Software Corp. Taneja Group analyst Arun Taneja, however, says that Kashya has a few features that set it apart. For starters, he says, the company’s technology allows systems administrators to set up policies determining which applications should be prioritized and which can stand to be replicated at a slower pace.

“This gives me the ability as a systems administrator to say that these are the things I want to replicate and that Application 1 is the most important,” he says. “I can say: ‘Prioritize the hell out of it. Give it whatever bandwidth it needs.' ”

In addition, the KBX4000 also enables administrators to set up consistency across databases. This means that all data across a certain portion of a database will be updated at the same time to ensure that all of the information the user sees is consistent. “To the best of my knowledge, that’s a unique feature,” Taneja says.