#memeconnect #fs
As business and IT professionals responsible for delivering secure, ubiquitous and timely access to corporate data surely have discovered, it’s not an easy task to accomplish. This is particularly true when it comes to the ever growing silos of unstructured data stores and file shares which continue to sprout up within corporate infrastructures large and small. One need look no further than the accelerated adoption of SharePoint sites and other collaboration tools - along with the unabated growth of email and other forms of electronic messaging to understand the problem is compounding every day.
Reducing the shear amount of unstructured data under management and the ability to move, save or manage it in place has become the first line of defense against growing storage assets, clogged servers and networks, slow discovery responses and shrinking back up windows. And while a compliance or security officer along with legal council could well argue that data reduction is by no means the most important component of a Unstructured Data Management (UDM) strategy, it is doubtful anyone would argue that reducing the corporate data footprint lowers the total cost of compliance and discovery as well as offering efficiency and collaboration benefits.
Storage tiering has become an integral part of the Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy and is often adopted in the case of storing or archiving unstructured data. However, data movement between active archives, passive archives and deep archives which often reside on different types of storage media is not an easy task. As the UDM solutions space continues to mature and challenges with data mobility become increasingly thorny, several players are stepping up with fresh approaches that promise to ameliorate proprietary storage bottlenecks. One such company is FalconStor.
Based in Melville, New York, FalconStor was founded in 2000 by CEO and Chairman ReiJane Huai along with other top engineering and management talent from Computer Associates by way of the Cheyenne Software acquisition where he was the chief architect of the backup and restore technology solution ARCserve. Now public (NASDAQ: FALC), the company expects revenues to reach close to $100 million for calendar year 2009 and the company anticipates maintaining its profitability even in a difficult economic climate. Sales are mostly through channels. Indeed, just about every technology industry heavyweight including Cisco, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Symantec is listed as either a strategic or technology partner.
FalconStor’s revenues are split as follows; 40% coming from Continuous Data Protection (CDP), another 40% from Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL) and the remaining 20% from the SAN Virtualization products group. According to ReiJane, “Nowhere is the constant pressure for additional equipment purchases more apparent than in the relentless demand for data storage driven by the ongoing exponential growth of digital information. Even in a slow economy, data proliferation continues and the need for data protection and disaster recovery (DR) has never been greater.”
Approach
FalconStor’s SAN management or Storage Virtualization abstraction layer offers data mobility between proprietary storage offerings without the need for APIs or interfaces as it maintains a consistent path for the data from one device to the other managed from a single policy management console. ReiJane and FalconStor refer to this model as the “TOTALLY Open™ model of heterogeneous storage virtualization which “calls for a radical departure from past thinking without requiring radical expenditures. Under this new open software storage model, all virtualization and data protection functions including provisioning, migration, deduplication, replication, snapshots, and archiving can be performed by a single, integrated software platform.” ReiJane goes on to say that interoperability between all FalconStor products is assured because they are all built on the same platform as their flagship Storage Virtualization products.
FalconStor recently rolled out a new stand-alone File Interface De-dup Service (FDS) in the first quarter or 2009 that offers a scalable data repository with deduplication which minimizes online storage capacity needs for backup and archiving applications with integrated data replication for DR. Meanwhile, FalconStor has the largest single-system performance for deduplication and there are benefits to be derived from one large system configuration. See Deduplication performance: What the vendors don't tell you. In addition, they offer both appliance and software only approaches.
Futures and Concerns
While FalconStor’s vision and products are well focused on alleviating major pain points in the data management space, particularly for unstructured data, there is so much at stake and so many players in the space many of their products may appear to be “me-to” entries. Their deduplication capabilities, which are targeted for the “post process” side to accommodate backup windows, will play well for some but not for other IT shops that believe “in-line” de-dup and other types of data reduction technologies, such as single instancing, are better suited for their environments. Additional WORM “lock” capabilities that are yet to be released will improve their chances in the overall market space. FalconStor also has a product coming out later this year that will address the archiving space but declined to get into the details of what that product might encompass.
Bottom line
No doubt FalconStor has a compelling story for data mobility - especially with its Storage Virtualization Layer solutions which afford the buyers the ability to install near raw storage at discounted prices and provide a tiering capability through a single management console. Users receive the added benefit of FalconStor’s engineering expertise that has architected a truly unified set of products and capabilities that compliment and interoperate well with each other even if additional partnerships are needed to offer added applications and capabilities such as security, content management, enterprise search and discovery. Buyers should also make an effort to better understand the interoperability capabilities of the FalconStor product line with market leading content management, archiving and collaboration solutions.
Action Item: Users looking for a way to maintain heterogeneous storage devices through a single console while managing a consistent path of data across virtual storage tiers and gaining additional benefits from a tightly integrated set of complimentary features and functions such as CDP and Deduplication should consider a Proof of Concept (POC) with FalconStor.
Footnotes:
