Leading Financial Institution Selects Kashya and Cisco for Deployment of Intelligent Fabric Infrastructure

Kashya, the leading supplier of data protection solutions fordisaster recovery, announced today that its KBX5000 Data ProtectionAppliance for the Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) MDS 9000 SANTap Service (SANTap)had been successfully evaluated for deployment at the NationwideBuilding Society, one of the UK's largest financial institutions.

Nationwide is the largest building society in the world, and thesecond-largest savings provider and fourth-largest mortgage lender inthe UK. With 150 years of expertise and experience as a savings andloan association, Nationwide is intent on looking after the interestsof its members while providing the broadest range of value mortgages,savings and other financial products. Protecting critical informationis a fundamental requirement for any organization -- and more so forfinancial institutions such as Nationwide, which required a dataprotection infrastructure that is flexible, can be deployed atreasonable cost and minimizes recovery time from a data disaster.

"With our implementation of multiple tiers of storage we requireda single solution for data protection," said Arthur Amos, head ofTechnology Infrastructure at Nationwide Building Society."Nationwide's view is that data movement should be one and the samewhether it is done within a single high-end array, a single mid-rangearray, between arrays of different types and even between sites. Wewent through an extensive evaluation of the various solutions on themarket today, and found that only the Kashya KBX5000 with itsnetwork-based architecture, offers us the ability to standardize onone data movement solution. Furthermore, because Kashya offersmarket-leading CDP functionality, we effectively received a superiorsolution at a much lower TCO. The KBX5000 has been successfullydeployed, replicating our production data. Furthermore, the Cisco MDSSANTap Service, which has been evaluated against a copy of ourproduction environment, will enable us to integrate the KBX5000appliance into our existing switch infrastructure without compromisingthe availability, reliability and integrity of our existingenvironment. It is refreshing to see a product that deliverseverything it promises."

SANTap functionality is enabled through the Cisco Storage ServicesModule (SSM) linecard, which can be inserted into any modular switchwithin the Cisco MDS 9000 family of multilayer intelligent storageswitches. Kashya's data protection solution coupled with Cisco SSMinfrastructure provides a flexible data protection solution thatsupports Nationwide's complex requirements without any host footprint.It supports a large number of standard and virtualized servers andhundreds of production database environments.

"Cisco MDS 9000 SANTap, an open protocol based service, enablescustomers to deploy appliance-based storage applications withoutcompromising the integrity, availability, or performance of theprimary data path between the servers and storage arrays," said EdChapman, senior director of product management, Data Center andStorage Business Unit, Cisco. "Applications such as Kashya's KBX5000Data Protection Appliance help enable customers to build highlyavailable, scalable storage networks that are resilient to datadisasters."

Kashya's KBX5000 Data Protection Appliance enabled Nationwide toreduce the cost and complexity of deploying data replication acrosstheir storage infrastructure. The Kashya data protection solutioneliminated the need for proprietary array replication technology,which Nationwide had previously been using in their environment. TheKashya KBX5000 is the only solution that provides fully integratedReplication and CDP capabilities, continuously protecting data acrossany server, across any distance, between any storage array. The Kashyasolution is very scalable and provides complete integration intoexisting applications with time-based and event driven recoverymechanisms. Service levels and policies are easily created and managedthrough an intuitive management console. Recovery from any datadisaster is simple and quick, minimizing application outages, businessdisruption and data loss.

"Data protection is no longer an option, it is a necessity," saidMichael Lewin, President and CEO of Kashya. "Nationwide BuildingSociety needed to integrate business continuance seamlessly into theirstorage infrastructure, a difficult task due the cost and complexityof other replication technologies. Kashya developed the KBX5000 DataProtection Appliance as an affordable and flexible alternative thatenables companies to protect more data and reduce the risks associatedwith data loss with minimum disruption at the lowest possible cost.The Kashya solution is simply a better way of deploying replicationfor disaster recovery for the enterprise."

About Kashya

Kashya leads the industry by reducing the cost and the complexityof data protection. Using unique technologies and an innovativeapproach, Kashya solutions cost-effectively solve many data protectionchallenges for organizations with heterogeneous server and storageinfrastructures. The Kashya KBX5000 Data Protection Appliance providesbest-in-class continuous remote replication (CRR) and continuous dataprotection (CDP) across any type of SAN environment, supporting highavailability configurations with enterprise class scalability. Kashyasolutions offer tremendous flexibility, including instantaneousrestoration, dynamic policy-based replication, WAN compression andsimple, yet powerful SAN management capabilities. The company isheadquartered in San Jose, California. For more information, visitKashya at www.kashya.com or call 1.866.KASHYA1.

Kashya, Kashya Data Protection Appliance and KBX5000 aretrademarks of Kashya. All other brand and product names are, or may betrademarks of their respective owners.