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Kashya Makes Kopies

Startup Kashya Inc. says it has engineered a disaster recovery (DR) solution akin to those from major storage vendors like EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) at a fraction of the cost.

Kashya emerged from stealth mode this week, having landed a total of $12 million in funding from Battery Ventures and Jerusalem Global Ventures. The company, founded in December 2000, maintains operations in San Jose, Calif., and Ramat Gan, Israel.

The company's out-of-band data-protection appliance, which is essentially software loaded onto an IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) xSeries server, plugs into a storage network to provide remote replication and snapshot functions for heterogeneous servers and storage across multiple locations, via an IP network.

The result? Business continuity in the face of just about any imaginable disaster that may strike locally, remotely, or anywhere in-between – at a far lower cost than anything available on the planet today, it boldly claims. [Ed. note: What is this, a preview of Armageddon?]

Marketing hyperbole aside, Kashya's product may have some merit. Hooking up a multi-hop DR solution from EMC, for example, really does cost millions. Customers generally have to buy three lots of EMC hardware – one each for the primary site, the staging site, and the secondary DR site – plus SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) replication software and TimeFinder snapshot software. In addition, customers have to purchase a CNT (Nasdaq: CMNT) router or something similar to perform the protocol conversion from Fibre Channel to IP when the data is replicated over a WAN (although new FC-over-Sonet offerings are promising to bypass this step – see Nortel Pipes SANs Into Sonet and SANs See Sonet).

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