FalconStor announced global enhancements to the FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS), Continuous Data Protector (CDP), and Virtual Tape Library (VTL) solutions. All are powered by an optimized FalconStor IPStor virtualization platform, resulting in better storage efficiencies and storage management through thin disaster recovery, proficient virtual appliances, and accelerated storage application performance.

“Insatiable storage growth, coupled with staff shortages and budget constraints, make thin provisioning a strategically important feature, providing the simplest and most flexible method for dynamically expanding volumes today,” said Stan Zaffos, research vice president at Gartner. “Thin provisioning´s profound benefits for IT organizations include improved staff productivity, higher end-user satisfaction rates, increased storage utilization, more accurate capacity forecasts, and smaller environmental footprints – all of which mean reduced costs. Applied in a business continuity scenario, thin provisioning ensures that only data actually written to the storage system is copied to or from a D/R site.”

FalconStor´s thin disaster recovery leverages thin provisioning, thin mirroring and thin replication volumes to deliver a thin, end-to-end disaster recovery infrastructure, resulting in management and cost efficiencies. With FalconStor´s Thin DR technology, storage allocations at the data center and the disaster recovery site no longer have to be identical.

FalconStor´s Thin DR feature utilizes the IPStor platform to deliver any to any heterogeneous storage replication and MicroScan technology with built-in de-duplication and compression to minimize the amount of data transferred at the granular disk-sector level. Customers can create a virtual volume to match the size of each data provisioning request, and allocate a smaller amount of actual physical disk space, assigning additional physical disk space automatically as needed. Thin provisioning reduces storage costs, thin replication reduces bandwidth costs and thin mirroring reduces wasteful over-provisioning of storage, all saving disk space and power consumption, helping to facilitate a substantially more efficient “Green” data center.

The enhanced IPStor platform also enables the construction of disk-based, data protection storage appliances using off-the-shelf components to create a virtual appliance integrated with the VMware ESXi. Small to medium-sized businesses can now create a virtual backup server on the fly for instant data recovery and business continuity.

These pre-built, pre-configured and ready-to-run software applications packaged with the OS inside a virtual machine reduce product delivery time and effort for system integrators and VARs, who can combine the FalconStor CDP Virtual Appliance, certified for the VMware Virtual Infrastructure, with VMware ESXi for an all-in-one solution architecture. This single system can be distributed to small to medium-sized businesses, empowering them to meet data protection challenges with instant recovery rather than data restore, for business continuity and disaster recovery for both physical and virtual machines.

“Our IPStor platform is the foundation for all of our award-winning NSS, CDP and VTL solutions,” said Wayne Lam, co-founder and vice president at FalconStor. “Optimizing this architecturally open virtualization platform enables our strategic and solution provider partners to leverage our technology to intelligently manage data growth, control capacity demands, supercharge application performance, and take data protection to an entirely new level.”

IPStor technology is embedded in a disk array system. With IPStor implanted in a single, 20Gb InfiniBand, 10Gb Ethernet or 4Gb Fibre Channel fault tolerant, active-active, dual-controller appliance, the need for multiple server appliances is eliminated. FalconStor partner H3C is using this model to capture market share lead in IP SANs in China.

The FalconStor NSS solution can also be combined with a memory appliance as storage-on-demand or as a read/write cache device to accelerate key applications to the speed of solid state disk (SSD). With the FalconStor NSS appliance fronted by the Violin 1010 memory appliance, production performance of data-centric applications is unleashed from disk seek times, since Tier-0 memory enables faster processing of terabyte-scale datasets. The dramatic I/O acceleration enables data center scalability and cost control, with on-demand provisioning of SSD to any existing SAN volume. For applications heavily used at end of the quarter, dynamic allocation of memory serves to supercharge these applications, or these “hottest” data sectors.

The enhanced IPStor platform powers all FalconStor solutions and includes additional host-based database and messaging agents for data integrity, as well as an additional Central Client Manager (CCM) for centralized management and reporting on the client side.