A diagram, taken from a PDF data sheet on the FalconStor website, showing the companys CDP Virtual Appliance performing remote data protection.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Encouraged by its second quarter results, “TOTALLY Open” data protection solutions provider FalconStor Software (www.falconstor.com) anticipates strong sales of its data deduplication and replication solutions, as well as growing brand recognition in the channel.
According to FalconStor’s announcement late in July, revenues were $20.3 million in the quarter ended June 30, 2010, an 18-percent increase over the previous quarter. “We are pleased with the continuing ramp up of the sales of our branded solutions around the world,” FalconStor chairman and chief executive officer ReiJane Huai said in a statement. “We expect the recently established strategic partnerships with top-tier storage vendors to accelerate the sales of our data deduplication and replication solutions, and boost our brand recognition in the channel.”
Based on the IPStor platform, FalconStor offers data protection solutions. In an interview with the WHIR, Falconstor CDP product manager Bobby Crouch explained how FalconStor’s suite of products, which are available as OEM or branded solutions, are designed to provide speed, integrity and simplicity in the storage of continuous available data.
The company’s suite of products includes File-interface Deduplication System, Continuous Data Protection, Virtual Tape Library, and Network Storage Server. Each solution is equipped with WAN-optimized replication for disaster recovery and remote office protection, and the HyperFS file system, which delivers a high-performance, massively scalable file system for data-intensive applications that generate enormous numbers of large files.
FalconStor VTL offers high performance and scalability, with backups that complete faster and more reliably – and in many instances the backup environment doesn’t need to change. It can achieve single-node backup speeds of 1.5 gigabytes per second, and up to eight nodes can combine into a single logical unit, scaling performance to 12 gigabytes per second.
“It has phenomenal metrics and capabilities,” says Crouch. “This is very well regarded by a number of analysts and customers around the world.”
As data continues to proliferate at great volume, data deduplication is emerging as a popular solution for improving storage utilization. By eliminating redundant copies of files, deduplication reduces the required storage capacity for data.
Announced last year, FalconStor FDS offers block-level deduplication of backup data via a simple file interface. “It allows customers to take file-based data and store them in a deduplicated manner,” Crouch says, explaining that it replicates files from remote sites to a central data repository, while ensuring that data will always be available.
“That gives [customers] the ability to have very efficient use of a relatively precious commodity – that being the disc drives. Even though costs are going down in disc drives, there are still costs.”
In June, FalconStor entered into a an agreement with storage solutions provider Hitachi Data Systems (www.hds.com), in which Hitachi would resell FalconStor VTL with deduplication and FalconStor FDS integrated with the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family, thereby creating what the companies called the industry’s first LAN-based deduplication system with high availability.
Combining local and remote protection into a cost-effective, unified, disk-based solution, FalconStor’s CDP technology offers advantages over once-a-day tape backups. FalconStor CDP promises fast, reliable recovery using technologies such as application integration, physical-to-virtual recovery, and WAN-optimized replication, which enable lost files to be recovered in two minutes and the restoration of entire systems in less than ten minutes.
FalconStor NSS provides intelligent storage virtualization optimized for VMware infrastructure, and supports VMware Site Recovery Manager, which adds a DR framework for virtualized environments. By virtualizing storage on a disk array, businesses can pool and tier their disk assets, simplifying provisioning, reducing allocation errors, maximizing resource utilization, and accelerating storage infrastructure.
“Our NSS product is no different in raw capability or basic capability than any other block-based storage device, whether it’s from NetApp or HP or HDS or IBM or EMC,” Crouch said. “The difference in that product is that we’re a software company – we can provide storage virtualization and a lot of those storage virtualization functions with no additional charge.”
This is, perhaps, the key differentiator. FalconStor includes mirroring, snapshots, replication, and WAN-optimized replication with compression and encryption for efficient remote recovery. It also offers thin provisioning, which maximizes disk utilization while reducing storage costs and power consumption. There are also application-aware snapshot agents, including Windows-certified agents, to ensure 100-percent transactional integrity, and Integrated Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes message recovery. Other providers, Crouch says, charge for each of these features, which FalconStor includes for free.
Furthermore, its solutions are heterogeneous, he says. “You want to use Falconstor software on top of EMC storage and allow that to replicate to Hitachi storage on the other end? go ahead. No constraints.”
In this way, FalconStor offers a wide ranging solution, which is capable of incorporating elements of different solutions – essentially giving users a variety of options so that service providers can tailor their solution as needed without missing key features. Web hosting operations, which already have a variety of solutions in place, might find that FalconStor’s “TOTALLY Open” approach could neatly fit, and replace at least some licences.
