Nationwide has 2,500 Fibre Channel switch ports on Cisco MDS 9509 director-class switches. The switches have a special line card that can host applications, such as backup and replication; assist applications running on appliances; or be used as a network accelerator.

The data replication appliance from San Jose-based Kashya works with the MDS switches.

The Kashya KBX5000 CDP appliance -- which consists of Kashya's software running on an IBM xSeries server -- replicates data between disparate arrays and can store together all changed data and the time it was changed, enabling immediate recovery to any point in time.

Any data changes that take place on Nationwide's 600 servers automatically pass through the MDS switches, which then split the data path and send one copy of the data to local storage arrays in the main data center and another copy to the Kashya appliance. The Kashya appliance then vaults that data to the disaster recovery site, which is 110 miles away. The Kashya appliance replicates to both Symmetrix and Clariion based on policies.

Managing replication through a single screen is "a far simpler solution to manage than with host-based technology," said Wright. "There was a fair amount of overhead associated with setting up each host [for replication].