Category: FalconStor

VMware ESX Server and its latest vSphere software release have become instrumental in helping organizations tame server hardware costs within data centers while improving the ROI associated with existing and new projects. But this isn’t to say that virtualization doesn’t come with any pain points–and managing virtual storage infrastructures is one of the biggest. So to help combat these challenges, FalconStor Software today announced at VMworld 2009 a comprehensive VMware Initiative that will help organizations bridge their physical and virtual infrastructures and provide continuous availability in multi-vendor storage environments.

Most VARs who have had success selling Data Domain systems over the last couple of years are feeling a bit uncomfortable right now: EMC has announced its official take-over of Data Domain. VARs have made a good living on Data Domain, contributing to Data Domain’s success as having one of the best-selling, fastest-growing deduplication storage systems in the market. VARs are now feeling vulnerable to EMC’s goodwill – or probable lack thereof.

Determining backup performance has consistently been extremely difficult for customers to rationalize, seeing as there is no real meter or benchmark to look at. Just take a second and think of all the moving parts inside your backup and recovery environment (media servers, clients, databases, email, network, SAN, disk, tape, offsite vaults) – you name it, there is a laundry list of things to look at when trying to determine accurate performance metrics.

Deduplication has emerged as “the” quick fix for the myriad of problems associated with enterprise backups. Deduplication enables organizations to shrink backup windows, minimize their reliance on tape, and more easily and cost effectively replicate their backup data to an offsite location. But as deduplication has grown in popularity, so has the number of ways that organizations can chose to implement it in their environment.

It’s easy for organizations to believe that disk will solve their backup problems. But some organizations are starting to discover that while disk solved some of their backup problems, they are still not realizing the full reductions in backup times and improved performance rates on their application servers that they may have initially expected. If an organization finds itself in this predicament, then it probably behooves them to take a closer look at their backup architecture and determine exactly how much backup traffic is going across their corporate LAN.

To understand a specific company’s technology, sometimes you have to do more than just understand the company behind the product, you have to understand the philosophy of the company behind the product. That was probably what impressed me the most when I recently had a briefing with Fadi Albatal, FalconStor’s Director of Product Marketing. Yes, we went over FalconStor’s new HyperTrac Backup Accelerator for VMware feature, but what really piqued my interest was how HyperTrac fits into FalconStor’s overall data protection methodology and why FalconStor’s customers can anticipate further innovations like this in the future.