Data protection is at the top of most storage managers' minds these days, especially in companies where information fuels not only business decisions but the business itself. XOsoft Inc., Burlington, MA, has carved a niche out of the burgeoning data protection market with a small arsenal of business-continuity products.

WANSyncHA, the latest incarnation of XOsoft's remote replication package, continuously replicates data to a local or remote site and provides automatic failover to ensure uninterrupted access. WANSyncHA's innovation is evident from the start, with its non-disruptive agent installation that doesn't require rebooting servers or stopping applications.

WANSyncHA runs on Windows, Linux and Sun operating system servers. Application-specific versions for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and Oracle databases provide services such as the autodiscovery of database files and network configurations. WANSyncHA is hardware-agnostic and operates with nearly any storage system.

The server agent software monitors all changes to files and directories in the server's file system and records changes to a journal. The journals are then used to synchronize the master data and replica data over a LAN or a WAN.

When synchronizing replica data with master data, WANSyncHA compares the data at the two servers and sends only the changes to minimize WAN traffic. WANSyncHA can also sense slow connections and spool changes until sufficient bandwidth is regained; updates interrupted by lost connections will recover and resume when the connection is re-established WANSyncHA can be configured in a many-to-one arrangement where a single replica at a remote site serves multiple masters. For more resilient disaster recovery, WANSyncHA can be used in a "tree" structure to create multiple replicas at disparate sites.

In a crowded disaster recovery market, WANSyncHA is "outstanding data protection solution," said one judge, who cited its "high innovation, high functionality, high performance and high value." And with a price tag that starts at approximately $5,200 to $10,000 per license, it's also a cost-effective approach to disaster recovery.

SearchStorage.com and Storage magazine editors