BakBone Announces Availability of Heterogeneous Data Replication Product Suite

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 12, 2005-- Comprehensive Data Replication Enables Continuous Availability of High Definition, Real-Time NASA Launch Video to Support Instantaneous Flight Data Analysis

BakBone Software(R) (TSX:BKB)(Pink Sheets:BKBO), a global provider of data protection software, continues to deliver on its recently announced Integrated Data Protection(TM) strategy by unveiling today new data protection capabilities, including NetVault(R): Replicator, NetVault(R): Replicator Plugin Modules for Exchange, SQL, Oracle(R) and MySQL(R), NetVault(R): Replicator Cluster Support Plugin and NetVault(R): Replicator On-Demand. These heterogeneous product offerings provide customers with real-time and scheduled replication functionality that can be easily integrated with existing BakBone backup, recovery and reporting solutions.

Designed to help customers protect critical business operations from disaster, this new suite of real-time replication technologies ensures the highest levels of data availability without the usual trade-offs in operating cost or limited platform support. NetVault: Replicator creates real-time copies of critical data in one or more locations and when combined with NetVault(R): Backup allows customers to implement cost-effective tiered data protection based on data value and recovery requirements. Unlike other point recovery or replication products, all functionality is managed from a central point of control.

" The focus on data availability, including the continuing concern about disaster recovery, as well as the new focus on compliance, is driving growth in data replication product revenue," says Carolyn DiCenzo, research vice president at Gartner, in her research report. "In fact, we expect the data replication market to grow from $1.4 billion in 2004 to $2.6 billion by 2009."

BakBone's latest product suite has been developed in response to escalating data availability demands. "For today's dynamic 24x7 organizations, data access and availability is essential to business success," said Jeff Drescher, director of product management, BakBone Software. "With the introduction of the NetVault: Replicator product suite, customers can now rely on BakBone to deliver scalable, heterogeneous real-time replication solutions as part of an overall high-availability strategy that ensures business-critical data is always online and available."

On July 26, 2005, space shuttle Discovery blasted off in the historic Return to Flight mission. As part of NASA's new Ground Camera Ascent Imagery Project (GCAIP), high definition video of the launch taken from more than 20 digital ground cameras, as well as airplanes in flight, was captured and distributed between NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to remote image analysis labs in NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas and Marshal Space Flight Center in Alabama. Using NetVault: Replicator to replicate these high-definition video images in real time between multiple Space Centers, analysts conducted instantaneous flight data analysis to make sure there was no damage to the space shuttle. NetVault: Replicator provided NASA analysts the assurance that mission-critical shuttle and flight data was continuously protected in real time and was highly available across multiple remote sites.

Maintaining continuous data availability across the entire IT infrastructure -- at the lowest total cost of ownership -- while ensuring the integrity and reliability of data at the transaction level are top corporate priorities. With NetVault: Replicator, BakBone is leveraging a patent-pending 'hybrid byte-level' data replication technology that combines the security of synchronous mirroring for critical online information with the reliability of journaling technology to provide continuous real-time replication over local and wide area networks. As the industry's first such solution, NetVault: Replicator synchronously journals changes at the source and asynchronously replicates the changes to target destinations, thus significantly reducing the time required to restore data availability after a disaster or major system outage.

In keeping with BakBone's strategy to provide solutions across multiple platforms, NetVault: Replicator maximizes current IT investments by installing seamlessly onto existing server hardware without downtime and is independent of file systems, volume managers and applications. Fully heterogeneous, NetVault: Replicator allows true cross-platform support for Windows(R), Linux, Solaris(R), AIX(R) and Mac(R) OS X and offers bi-directional operations and one-to-many configuration options. The result is an efficient and flexible solution for maintaining continuous business operations.

BakBone Real-Time Data Replication Suite

NetVault: Replicator is the ideal tool for implementing disaster recovery solutions over local or wide-area networks. A hybrid real-time data replication solution for heterogeneous enterprise environments, the software can be installed on any server, workstation or appliance running a supported server operating system. The product provides automatic content synchronization of any size data storage environment independent of applications. Remote mirroring of critical data is possible from anywhere-to-anywhere(TM) in real time between two or more physically separate devices over any IP-based network.

NetVault: Replicator combined with the optional Replicator Plugin Modules for Exchange, SQL, Oracle and MySQL databases guarantees write order fidelity and transactional integrity, without compromising local host performance as is common with purely synchronous solutions. The enterprise software product is an ideal solution for mirroring databases and large data sets to other hot-standby servers in remote locations.

NetVault: Replicator may be combined with the optional NetVault: Replicator Cluster Support Plugin to become a cluster aware solution that will coexist with a third party cluster manager to provide for flexible integration of replication requirements after automatic server failover. The combined solution provides the framework to support many clustered application types including databases, messaging systems and file servers.

NetVault: Replicator On-Demand is a scheduled replication product that provides a point-in-time remote replica of file and application data on demand, designed for specific operating environments with less-demanding storage requirements than those running NetVault: Replicator.