WANSyncCD Boosts Data Replication Speeds

Xosoft Inc.s new WANSyncCD content management system builds on the companys strong WAN replication and data rollback tools.

Click here to read the full review of WANSyncCD.

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Xosoft Inc.s new WANSyncCD content management system builds on the companys strong WAN replication and data rollback tools.

This first release of WANSyncCD (CD stands for Content Delivery), which will ship this month, lets companies quickly replicate content from a master site to remote offices, ensuring that branches have access to up-to-date documents and files. WANSyncCD is priced at $2,000 per server, with volume discounts for sites with more than 50 servers.

In eWEEK Labs tests, WANSyncCD was easy to set up and configure, and it allowed us to efficiently replicate documents to multiple servers.

With its intelligent replication and its bandwidth-conserving functionality, WANSyncCD is geared for large organizations with multiple sites and file servers that need to distribute or share a variety of files and data.

Unlike Xosofts WANSync product, which offers basic point-to-point replication, WANSyncCD works in a tree-topology form, with data flowing down from the top of the tree. For example, after we added a new document to the master file server at the top of the tree, the replication flowed across the network from one server to the next.

In contrast, other replication schemes have the master server feed the replication streams to the individual file servers at lower branches.

Using WANSyncCD technology, a company can easily minimize the amount of data running across its WAN links. An IT manager can have a master server on the East Coast send updates across the WAN to a West Coast office, and the West Coast office can, in turn, update all servers near it.

WANSyncCD supports many-to-one replication scenarios, which can push data generated by the branch offices back to the home office for backup or management.

WANSyncCDs replication engine has features for minimizing bandwidth use. Replication can be configured to send only changes (instead of replicating entire documents).

WANSyncCDs management tools offer the option of using continuous replication (which is good for situations where documents change rapidly) or scheduled replication, so band- width isnt burned during peak business hours.

Bandwidth throttling is also available; we used it to cut replication traffic in our networks down to a few kilobits per second to simulate links to dial-up sites.

WANSyncCD works with Windows servers, Solaris and AIX, but there is currently no Linux support.

Senior Analyst Henry Baltazar can be reached at henry_baltazar@ziffdavis.com.

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