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

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- First Implementation of SAN-Based Data Replication Solution Running at Nationwide Building Society, One of the Largest UK Financial Institutions

Kashya, the leading supplier of data protection solutions for disaster recovery, announced today that it's KBX5000 Data Protection Appliance for the Cisco MDS 9000 SANTap Service (SANTap) had been successfully evaluated for deployment at the Nationwide Building Society, one of the UK's largest financial institutions.

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

"With our implementation of multiple tiers of storage we required a single solution for data protection," said Arthur Amos, head of Technology Infrastructure at Nationwide Building Society. "Nationwide's view is that data movement should be one and the same whether it is done within a single high-end array, a single mid-range array, between arrays of different types and even between sites. We went through an extensive evaluation of the various solutions on the market today, and found that only the Kashya KBX5000 with its network-based architecture, offers us the ability to standardize on one data movement solution. Furthermore, because Kashya offers market-leading CDP functionality, we effectively received a superior solution at a much lower TCO. The KBX5000 has been successfully deployed, replicating our production data. Furthermore, the Cisco MDS SANTap Service, which has been evaluated against a copy of our production environment, will enable us to integrate the KBX 5000 appliance into our existing switch infrastructure without compromising the availability, reliability and integrity of our existing environment. It is refreshing to see a product that delivers everything it promises."

SANTap functionality is enabled through the Cisco Storage Services Module (SSM) linecard, which can be inserted into any modular switch within the Cisco MDS 9000 family of multilayer intelligent storage switches. Kashya's data protection solution coupled with Cisco SSM infrastructure provides a flexible data protection solution that supports Nationwide's complex requirements without any host footprint. It supports a large number of standard and virtualized servers and hundreds of production database environments.

"Cisco MDS 9000 SANTap, an open protocol-based service, enables customers to deploy appliance-based storage applications without compromising the integrity, availability, or performance of the primary data path between the servers and storage arrays," said Ed Chapman, senior director of product management, Data Center and Storage Business Unit, Cisco. "Applications such as Kashya's KBX5000 Data Protection Appliance help enable customers to build highly available, scalable storage networks that are resilient to data disasters."

Kashya's KBX5000 Data Protection Appliance enabled Nationwide to reduce the cost and complexity of deploying data replication across their storage infrastructure. The Kashya data protection solution eliminated the need for proprietary array replication technology, which Nationwide had previously been using in their environment. The Kashya KBX5000 is the only solution that provides fully integrated Replication and CDP capabilities, continuously protecting data across any server, across any distance, between any storage array. The Kashya solution is very scalable and provides complete integration into existing applications with time-based and event driven recovery mechanisms. Service levels and policies are easily created and managed through an intuitive management console. Recovery from any data disaster is simple and quick, minimizing application outages, business disruption and data loss.

"Data protection is no longer an option, it is a necessity," said Michael Lewin, President and CEO of Kashya. "Nationwide Building Society needed to integrate business continuance seamlessly into their storage infrastructure, a difficult task due to the cost and complexity of other replication technologies. Kashya developed the KBX5000 Data Protection Appliance as an affordable and flexible alternative that enables companies to protect more data and reduce the risks associated with data loss with minimum disruption at the lowest possible cost. The Kashya solution is simply a better way of deploying replication for disaster recovery for the enterprise."

About Kashya

Kashya leads the industry by reducing the cost and the complexity of data protection. Using unique technologies and an innovative approach, Kashya solutions cost-effectively solve many data protection challenges for organizations with heterogeneous server and storage infrastructures. The Kashya KBX5000 Data Protection Appliance provides best-in-class continuous remote replication (CRR) and continuous data protection (CDP) across any type of SAN environment, supporting high availability configurations with enterprise class scalability. Kashya solutions offer tremendous flexibility, including instantaneous restoration, dynamic policy-based replication, WAN compression and simple, yet powerful SAN management capabilities. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California. For more information, visit Kashya at www.kashya.com or call 1.866.KASHYA1.

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