Snapshot: WANSync Keeps Sites Up-To-Date

Small companies that want to protect against downtime and file corruption would be fine with the server-level XOsoft Inc.s Data Rewinder alone (see review, above). However, for companies with backup data centers or remote sites, XOsofts WANSync software can ensure that data at remote failover sites is kept up-to-date.

WANSync 3.5, which shipped in June, gains the ability to manage and view all replication scenarios from a single console. WANSync 3.5 costs $2,995 per file server and $3,995 per database server.

In tests, we found that WANSync 3.5 was relatively easy to set up and manage in our testbed of Windows 2000 file servers. WANSync 3.5s bandwidth management capabilities can be tailored to utilize network infrastructures at optimum levels. We could choose between file-level synchronization (where an entire file is replicated when a change occurs), which can be used for replicating smaller files, and block-level synchronization (which sends only changes over the WAN) for replicating large data sets such as databases. WANSync 3.5 is compatible with Microsoft Corp.s SQL Server and Exchange and Oracle Corp.s Oracle8i and 9i (on Windows and Solaris 7 and 8).