Bytes Technology Group Systems Integration offers heterogeneous, cost-effective replication with Kashya KBX appliance

The Advanced Technology Services (ATS) - Storage division within Bytes Technology Group Systems Integration (BTG SI) has added a unique disaster recovery (DR) focused solution in its basket of offerings, with the Kashya KBX Data Protection Appliance.

Kashya is an Israeli-based vendor, whose hardware-based solutions are able to deliver a data replication package regardless of the distance between data centres, with no reliance on bespoke or even similar hardware back-ends, and a central management point to help administrators bring your DR system under control.

Says Mike Broderick, Divisional Director of BTG SI - ATS Storage: "The KBX range is made up of SAN-based appliances that are out of the data path. Merely plug the unit onto the corporate IP network, connected to another KBX at the remote site, and you are ready to ensure your mission-critical data centre can be quickly replicated.

"Deploying a KBX DR solution entirely bypasses the thorny problem of having to deploy identical storage arrays at both ends. Your high-availability high-performance storage arrays at your primary data centre, which are usually complex and costly, can be replicated onto any storage subsystem available at the secondary site. The appliance allows a many to one consolidation, which effectively allows EMC, HP, IBM and HDS devices to replicate to a single ATA Vault," continues Broderick.

As an entirely heterogeneous storage environment it ensures previous storage architecture investments can be redeployed in the new DR solution, maximising the benefits of existing assets. This in turn drives down costs, as new, identical hardware is not required to replicate the primary data store.

Further investment protection comes from the fact that the KBX appliance incorporates proprietary compression techniques to enable it to be deployed over the ubiquitous IP infrastructure. Ordinarily, a holistic data solution with similar capabilities would have required that a fibre channel (FC)-based transport layer be deployed, and FC to IP converters installed where necessary.

"Apart from driving up costs, traditional models require that the primary and secondary data centres be within a specified distance apart, therefore if your organisation had previously deployed two geographically distant sites, one of these would need to be rebuilt at a closer location in order to enable replication," adds Broderick. "With Kashya compression techniques, sites can be utilised in the replication procedure regardless of their distance from the primary centre, utilising the Internet as a transport protocol. Oracle, DB2 and SQL data flow is further optimised through integrated application-aware compression specifically for these latency-sensitive environments."

These capabilities make the KBX DR solutions ideal for customer environments tired of being locked in to a specific vendor for their business continuity plan to be workable. With Kashya, these customers can now begin enjoying the freedom of a vendor-agnostic replication environment, the ability to reuse existing storage investments, and long-distance replication over IP.

"Conventional solutions would be deployed either at the host layer, or the storage layer. Both of these models have their own disadvantages. Host layer deployments devour precious CPU time on the host systems, which in turn means that more powerful servers are needed in order to cater for a DR solution and ensure the users data requests are responded to quickly enough," states Broderick. "Host based systems also require a licence for each server being replicated, and can quickly turn into a management nightmare if your environment consists of a significant number of servers needing replication."

The KBX benefits from being deployed at the SAN Fabric layer. Apart from a small software agent installed on each disparate host, the solution doesn`t use the CPU resources of these servers, and can provide replication for any number of hosts on a per TB replicated licensing model. Should an intelligent fabric from Cisco or Brocade be used, no host clients are required. Simultaneously a KBX solution offers a single point of management for replicating these multiple hosts and heterogeneous storage environment.

KBX offers a three-in-one replication solution. Snapshot-based replication, synchronous and asynchronous modes are supported depending on the replication policies set down by the customer. This allows for these policies to dictate bandwidth usage while ensuring high-priority data is replicated immediately. DR testing is also made easier because of the ability to pause the distribution of the replicated data, giving administrators the time to mount the remote volumes and confirm the integrity of the replicated data without interrupting the data centre operations.

Finally, KBX appliances support intelligent fabric architectures such as the Cisco SSM platform for easy integration into this enterprise environment. The Brocade intelligent fabric system will be supported in the very near future as well. Even virtualisation solutions, such as IBM SVC for instance, can be replicated using the Kashya offering without forcing virtualisation on all data.

In conclusion, Broderick says: "The Kashya KBX data replication solutions now available from BTG SI offer users the opportunity to take control of their enterprise DR requirements at a lower initial Capex, while driving down operating costs thanks to the support of heterogeneous storage environments and simpler management of the entire replication infrastructure through a single management console."