Kashya also offers an interesting alternative to that scenario: You can deploy the KBX5000 without installing agents on your servers, which minimizes possible downtime and application incompatibilities.

In that configuration, Kashya deploys more applications on its appliance instead of agents on your servers. The applications, communicating with intelligent switches from Brocade and Cisco, capture critical data transfers between servers and storage targets. A more detailed explanation of how that works with a Cisco fabric is here.

Last week Kashya announced a new version of its KBX5000. "What the new version, R2.3, brings forth is true integration between our disaster recovery and CDP application," explains Rick Walsworth, vice president of marketing at Kashya. "That means that at a remote site, I have now CDP recovery capability rather than just incremental snapshots."

In addition to offering more granular recovery at a remote site (a feature that previously was available only for local data), the new version integrates with Microsoft VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Services) and can better track application-driven changes to SQL Server and Exchange databases.

A similar application awareness applies to Oracle databases and generates what Kashya calls "application bookmarks," essentially tags that identify consistent recovery points. Users don't have to change their applications because those bookmarks are created automatically.