SCIENCE

FalconStor Software announced a comprehensive upgrade of its suite of data protection solutions. Version 7 (V7) of FalconStor's product family offers the fundamental solutions for implementing next-generation backup and disaster recovery (DR) today -- making it simple and cost effective to maintain uptime of critical IT services in the face of exponential data growth, widespread use of virtual servers and business demand for high availability.

Version 7 of FalconStor's data protection suite synchronizes the product line and offers customers a complete set of solutions that provides everything needed to optimize legacy backup systems, migrate to disk-based backup and DR and guarantee fast recovery of essential systems and applications, while also laying the foundation for service-oriented data protection.

"Legacy backup and recovery methods are severely challenged as the pressing demand for IT service availability is compounded by shrinking budgets and complexities caused by remote offices and mobile users," said Fadi Albatal, vice president of worldwide marketing for FalconStor. "With V7, FalconStor's data protection solutions have been optimized to deliver a holistic approach to backup and recovery that helps data centers of all sizes overcome obstacles to continuous service and data availability."

FalconStor data protection solutions enable customers to:

-- Seamlessly migrate to scalable, high-performance, disk-based backup with FalconStor's deduplication technology, eliminating inefficient backup and recovery from tape.

-- Optimize backup of both file and block data across a highly available, scalable global deduplication repository.

-- Protect more data in less time with fast restoration, consolidating recovery point objectives (RPO) to mere seconds.

-- Combine highly available virtualized heterogeneous storage environments with improved I/O performance, robust failover, data migration and automated DR to ensure data availability and business continuity.

-- Extend the value of VMware vSphere by supporting VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) across heterogeneous storage platforms while integrating physical server failover and failback with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager support.

"As a communications service provider, Sunrise cannot tolerate any downtime that affects customer access to our services and information. In testing the new shared deduplication repository included in version 7 of FalconStor VTL and FalconStor FDS within our environment, we have seen an increase in backup and DR performance ensuring that any back-end issues affecting our customers are kept to an absolute minimum," said Sandor Orban, senior storage engineer for Sunrise Communications AG, a provider of mobile telephony, fixed network and Internet services in Switzerland. "In addition, we look forward to upgrading to FalconStor NSS V7 to take advantage of VMware vSphere 5 support in our large VMware/FalconStor NSS environment that runs critical customer-facing services."

Key V7 enhancements

-- FalconStor(R) Virtual Tape Library (VTL): Very high-performance deduplication with pre-parsing of data; real-time dashboards for full operational visibility; scales to more than one petabyte of storage; global deduplication repository.

-- FalconStor(R) File-interface Deduplication System (FDS): High availability; shared global deduplication repository with FalconStor VTL.

-- FalconStor(R) Continuous Data Protector (CDP): 1,000 snapshots per volume for highly granular points of recovery and longer retention time; multi-threaded architecture accelerates performance of replication, compression and encryption.

-- FalconStor(R) Network Storage Server (NSS): Supports VMware vSphere and VMware VAAI and extends VMware functionality in heterogeneous SAN environments that may not offer native VAAI support; accommodates greater volume scalability, larger drive sizes and virtual machine density.

Version 7 of FalconStor's data protection product suite is available immediately.

FalconStor hosts online presentation and discussion

Please register to join FalconStor's V7 launch presentation and discussion: Break the Barriers to Data Protection, which takes place today, Monday, August 22, 2011, at 11:00 a.m. E.T. Speakers include: Jim McNiel, president and CEO; Mike DiMeglio, director of product marketing; and Sandor Orban, senior storage engineer for Sunrise Communications.

What customers are saying

"We look forward to upgrading to version 7 of FalconStor NSS and FalconStor CDP and taking advantage of the enhanced performance, high availability and failover capabilities of these products. We also feel that service-oriented data protection is the future of backup and recovery, integrating all data management functions into one scalable solution." -- Casey Carvalho, assistant director technical services, Ryerson University

"The performance and scalability refinements in version 7 are bringing FalconStor products up to the next level. FalconStor's automated DR capability inherent in FalconStor CDP is a huge benefit -- it speeds the pace of recovery, reduces hardware costs, and allows us to do off-line recovery practice. With version 7, FalconStor is moving closer to its vision of service-oriented data protection and leading the industry in the right direction." -- Justin Bell, network engineer, Strand Associates

"Since we are a distributed organization, Halma IT needs the scalability and versatility of FalconStor solutions. Currently we are using FalconStor CDP extensively to provide reliable local and remote disaster recovery to our subsidiaries worldwide. With the launch of version 7 of FalconStor's product suite and the promise of FalconStor's service-oriented data protection solution, we clearly envision its potential to be our one console for optimizing and managing all of our data protection processes." -- Scott Sears, group data protection manger, Halma IT Services

"Using FalconStor VTL with deduplication, we have significantly reduced our backup window and eliminated redundant data. We are excited about Version 7 and its performance enhancements." -- Gerardo Colon, Storage Administrator, AHS Information Services