Both Barrels Communications Ltd

FalconStor today introduced a low-priced virtualisation promotion in order to increase reseller margins on smaller virtualisation projects.

“Virtualisation starts to make sense as soon as a company reaches just three physical servers,” explains Philippe Bruiant, director of channel sales operations, FalconStor EMEA. “And, when you consider how common it is to have a file server, print server, email server, network server or a database server, that actually means a heck of a lot of businesses.”

“However, many of these businesses will not be interested in zero downtime, or fault tolerance, or disaster recovery. Consequently, projects for this sort of customer tend to be of low value, generating low margins for resellers – and this makes them unattractive projects. This highly competitive offer is for resellers that are willing to virtualise the servers and storage of customers with limited requirements and provides the resellers with ‘instant margin’,” Bruiant said.

Until June 15th, the FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS) Virtual Appliance with a one terabyte storage capacity license is priced at €800, a reduction of €400, on proof of purchase of a VMware vSphere™ 4 Essentials Bundle. VMware is currently offering its vSphere™ 4 Essentials Bundle at US$495 instead of US$995. Products are available from VMware- and FalconStor-accredited channel partners respectively. [See Notes to editors for more details.]

[ends]

About VMware vSphere™ Essentials
About VMware VSphere™ Essentials provides an all-in-one solution for small businesses to consolidate and manage many application workloads while reducing hardware and operating costs with a low up-front investment.

About FalconStor NSS
FalconStor NSS Virtual Appliance transforms internal disk storage of servers (DAS) into an iSCSI SAN. A cost-effective, highly available infrastructure for the small/medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and remote office/branch offices (ROBOs), it enables VMware‘s advanced features yet needs no additional storage network investment. All FalconStor solutions come in three deployment options: virtual appliance, storage appliance, or gateway appliance (connects to third-party storage devices).

Note to editors
Both products in the bundle are available from VMware- and FalconStor-accredited channel partners, respectively. Both products must be purchased within 10 working days of each other. Proof of VMware vSphere purchase will be asked by FalconStor. Offer price valid for orders received by June 15, 2010.

FalconStor Software, Inc, the provider of TOTALLY Open™ data protection solutions, today announced financial results for its first quarter ended March 31, 2010.

Revenues for the first quarter of 2010 were $17.1 million, compared with $21.0 million for the same period a year ago. GAAP loss from operations for the quarter was $8.5 million, compared with a loss of $0.8 million in the first quarter of 2009. GAAP net loss for the quarter was $5.5 million, or $0.12 per share, compared with a net loss of $0.9 million, or $0.02 per share, in the first quarter of 2009. Stock-based compensation expense was $2.7 million in the first quarter of 2010 and $2.2 million in the first quarter of 2009.

Non-GAAP loss from operations was $5.8 million in the first quarter of 2010, compared with operating income of $1.3 million for the same period a year ago. Non-GAAP net loss was $3.8 million, or $0.08 per share in the first quarter of 2010, compared with net income of $0.6 million, or $0.01 per diluted share, in the first quarter of 2009. Non-GAAP results exclude the effects of stock-based compensation expense net of the related income taxes.

The Company closed the quarter with $40.5 million in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities. Deferred revenue at March 31, 2010 was $23.0 million.

“Besides expense containment/reduction, we are also focusing on capturing growth opportunities in data deduplication, data protection and cloud-based services,” said ReiJane Huai, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of FalconStor. “Through strategic partnerships and cloud-based services we believe we will be able to accelerate the market awareness/acceptance of our solutions and produce long term shareholder value.”

[ends]

Non-GAAP Financial Measures
The non-GAAP financial measures used in this press release are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles and may be different from non-GAAP financial measures used by other companies. The Company´s management refers to these non-GAAP financial measures in making operating decisions because they provide meaningful supplemental information regarding the Company´s operating performance. In addition, these non-GAAP financial measures facilitate management´s internal comparisons to the Company´s historical operating results and comparisons to competitors´ operating results. We include these non-GAAP financial measures (which should be viewed as a supplement to, and not a substitute for, their comparable GAAP measures) in this press release because we believe they are useful to investors in allowing for greater transparency into the supplemental information used by management in its financial and operational decision-making. For a reconciliation of our GAAP and non-GAAP financial results, please refer to our Non-GAAP Operating Data GAAP Reconciliation here.

New FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator doubles overall SAN performance
at a fraction of the cost of conventional disk storage solutions

FalconStor Software and Violin Memory today announced the first flash-memory-based storage system that simultaneously accelerates reads and writes for mission-critical applications as well as general SAN performance. The FalconStor® NSS SAN Accelerator doubles SAN performance, delivering high-speed access to stored data with minimal latency, at a fraction of the cost of conventional solutions.

The FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator combines the FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS) Gateway, a Violin 1010 Flash Memory Appliance and FalconStor’s storage management software to create a virtual SAN out of new or existing storage resources while introducing a solid state memory array as a caching platform for all application data requiring the fastest input/output (I/O). The integrated solution uses an economical amount of solid state storage as a caching platform. Lab tests of the FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator conducted by FalconStor show that a solid-state layer of one percent of a SAN’s total storage capacity will increase overall SAN performance greater than 100 percent.

“Our evaluation of the FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator proved that it can significantly enhance storage response time and underload scalability,” said George Crump, founder of Storage Switzerland. “The interesting capability of this system is that it can be deployed into an existing SAN and yield impressive improvements in performance and scalability at a reasonable cost.”

“There are no other solutions on the market today that can yield as much performance enhancement out of a modest investment in a solid state tier of a virtualized SAN,” said Fadi Albatal, vice president of marketing for FalconStor. “FalconStor’s innovative storage management software intelligently and predictably accelerates reads and writes to the SAN on a global basis and is not exclusive to an application or a specific storage segment.”

FalconStor’s SafeCache™ and HotZone® features for Write/Read Acceleration
FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator speeds up both writes and reads with two unique capabilities of Falconstor storage management software: SafeCache™ and HotZone® features. FalconStor’s SafeCache capability allows a segment of the solid state memory array to be devoted to application writes so that all disk writes can be received and acknowledged with low latency. The data is then written transparently to the destination storage volumes on the SAN.

FalconStor’s HotZone capability accelerates the read process of specific applications, including random-access databases, and general SAN I/O by monitoring disk access patterns and then intelligently copying the hot data to a HotZone cache on the solid state memory array for faster read access. When the data is no longer heavily used, the data is deleted from the cache and referenced back to its original location in the SAN to make room for other highly active datasets.

About the Violin 1010 Flash Memory Appliance
The Violin 1010 is a four-terabyte enterprise-class flash appliance that provides sustainable performance with sub-100uS deterministic latency and serviceability (including automatic active sparing and hot swap of flash modules). Based on patent-pending flash RAID algorithms, the Violin 1010 provides enterprise data centers with performance and reliability at a lower cost than any traditional performance storage systems with solid state disks (SSD). To achieve a 100 percent performance boost, it is more than three times less expensive to add a solid state memory cache with the FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator than it is to upgrade a SAN with additional disk arrays.

“Violin Memory is dedicated to developing the fastest, most reliable and economical solid state memory solutions for the enterprise market,” said Matt Barletta, vice president of product marketing for Violin Memory. “Solid state as a consumer technology has been around for a while, but we are now showing the many ways that scalable solid state memory arrays can revolutionize traditional enterprise storage methods and business practices. Together with FalconStor, we are providing customers with application acceleration options and flexibility never before available.”

Pricing and availability
FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator will be available in Europe from May for a list price of $32,000, which includes one solid state memory array with 500 gigabytes of RAID-protected storage capacity. The solution will be available through FalconStor’s channel partners.

About Violin Memory, Inc.
Violin Memory, Inc. provides the world’s fastest and most scalable memory appliances that provide dramatic application acceleration for enterprise applications ranging from database, analytics, data warehousing, SAN acceleration, web caching and any other application that require very high IOPS and predictable low latency. Violin delivers density, reliability and per terabyte pricing competitive with enterprise-class performance hard-disk storage arrays transforming the pricing structure of the performance storage market. With support for multiple memory types including SLC & MLC flash, Violin Memory’s silicon storage appliances provide significant power and space savings with extreme data reliability and sustained performance. Founded in 2005, Violin Memory is headquartered in San Jose, California. For more information on Violin Memory products, visit www.violin-memory.com.

About FalconStor
FalconStor Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: FALC) is the market leader in disk-based data protection. FalconStor delivers proven, comprehensive data protection solutions that facilitate the continuous availability of business-critical data with speed, integrity, and simplicity. The Company’s TOTALLY Open™ technology solutions, built upon the award-winning IPStor® platform, include the industry leading Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with deduplication, Continuous Data Protector (CDP), File-interface Deduplication System (FDS), and Network Storage Server (NSS), each enabled with WAN-optimized replication for disaster recovery and remote office protection. FalconStor products are available from major OEMs and solution providers including 3Com, Acer, Data Direct Networks, Dynamic Solutions International, EMC, IBM, Oracle, Pillar Data Systems, SGI, and Spectra Logic and are deployed by thousands of customers worldwide, from small businesses to Fortune 1000 enterprises.

FalconStor is headquartered in Melville, N.Y., with offices throughout Europe and the Asia Pacific region. For more information, visit www.falconstor.com.

# # #

FalconStor, FalconStor Software, IPStor, and HotZone are registered trademarks, and TOTALLY Open and SafeCache are trademarks of FalconStor Software, Inc. in the US and other countries. All other company and product names contained herein may be trademarks of their respective holders.

Nexsan first FalconStor technology partner to incorporate FalconStor FDS 2.0 into its storage systems

FalconStor Software, Inc. today announced version 2.0 of FalconStor® File-interface Deduplication System (FDS), which takes LAN-based deduplication to the next level of enterprise-class functionality with high availability and other enterprise capabilities. Nexsan is the first FalconStor technology partner to incorporate FalconStor FDS 2.0 into its storage offering in the Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0 family of deduplication appliances.

FalconStor FDS is designed for both small-to-medium-size businesses and large enterprises looking to reduce storage space and costs by writing backup data more efficiently to disk. With the addition of high availability, enterprises of all sizes will retain access to their backed-up data, ensuring that backups of critical systems can always be completed within narrow backup windows – which is especially important for databases that may run a company’s ERP, CRM or other important applications. Other enterprise-class features in FDS 2.0 include:

• support for Symantec OpenStorage (OST) delivers 5.4 terabytes per hour of backup data throughput, ingest rates of 1.5 gigabytes per second over two 10 Gigabit Ethernet links for double the performance.
• an increased fan-in ratio of 150-to-1 that supports more distributed environments and enhances the scope of global deduplication.
• an enhanced replication dashboard for real-time status monitoring.
• more granular, folder level, replication support.
• policy driven end-to-end data integrity checking.
• collision avoidance that ensures data consistency and prevents data loss.

“The release of Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0, which integrates the advanced enterprise-class capabilities of FalconStor FDS 2.0, underscores our commitment to offering market-leading deduplication solutions,” said Bob Woolery, senior vice president of marketing for Nexsan. “Today’s organizations require cost-effective solutions for high availability and continuous data access; the Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0 meets these requirements while providing the optimized performance and efficiency enterprises of all sizes demand.”

“With this significant enhancement to FalconStor FDS, FalconStor now leads the market in features, scalability and performance in enterprise-class deduplication solutions for data centers,” said Fadi Albatal, vice president of product marketing for FalconStor. “The market has been demanding a high-availability dedupe solution for NAS-based disk-to-disk backup environments, and we are the first to deliver.”

Pricing and availability
FalconStor FDS 2.0 will be generally available at the end of February through FalconStor’s worldwide network of channel partners. The Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0 family of deduplication appliances will be available at the end of February through Nexsan’s worldwide channel partner network.

[ends]

About FalconStor FDS
FalconStor FDS offers block-level deduplication of backup data via a simple file interface. FalconStor FDS extends the company´s highly scalable data deduplication technology – already widespread as part of the industry-leading FalconStor® Virtual Tape Library (VTL) solution – to network-attached storage (NAS) disk-to-disk backup environments. With built-in many-to-one replication capability, the file-interface system provides global deduplication by replicating from remote sites to a central data repository across the wide-area network.

FalconStor Software, Inc. today announced that The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea has completed an important upgrade to its storage management infrastructure with FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS).

The upgrade to FalconStor NSS is significant because it enables the Borough to leverage its existing storage arrays for use with VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager in its VMware environment in order to provide automated disaster recovery. FalconStor NSS serves as the gateway for storage virtualization and replication, utilizing the Borough´s storage arrays and provisioning them as virtual disks to the VMware environment, enabling VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager in their multivendor SAN infrastructure.

“Upgrading to FalconStor NSS means we have gained the functionality of VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager, which we really needed,” said Barry Goodall, IT manager for The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea. “But we’re still entirely vendor neutral when it comes to choosing replacement storage arrays, some of which are entering their end-of-life phase now. This puts us in a stronger negotiating position with respect to the hardware vendors, saving taxpayers’ money without compromising the quality of our IT and storage infrastructure.”

“The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea is realizing the promise of server and storage virtualization through their use of FalconStor NSS with VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager,” said Thomas Barrett, vice president for Northern European Sales & Operations for FalconStor. “They are now reaping the benefits, maximizing their system and data availability and improving their physical resource utilization.”

Other benefits of upgrading to FalconStor NSS includes access to advanced features, such as thin provisioning, and performance-enhancing benefits, such as true active-active failover for high data availability, leading to improved storage performance.

The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea first deployed FalconStor software solutions in 2005 and has remained a customer continuously since then. More than 20 terabytes of data are now under the management of its FalconStor NSS system. The solution manages both SAN and NAS, and replicates data between the Council’s primary and DR data centres.

[ends]

FalconStor Software, Inc. today announced FalconStor’s comprehensive support for Oracle® VM, Oracle’s server virtualization platform. FalconStor’s storage virtualization and data replication solutions for virtual servers are now integrated and available for Oracle VM, bringing a high level of data protection, recoverability and continuous availability to Oracle virtual environments.

“Oracle’s collaboration with FalconStor complements the Oracle VM environment with well-integrated storage virtualization and data protection capabilities that bring value to our customers,” said Wim Coekaerts, vice president of Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle. “Oracle VM helps customers drive down the cost and complexity of their enterprise IT infrastructures, while FalconStor solutions introduce viable data availability and rapid recovery.”

FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS), an intelligent storage virtualization and provisioning platform, integrates with Oracle VM to enable data mobility and centralized storage management for Oracle VM servers. FalconStor® Continuous Data Protector (CDP) integrates with Oracle VM deployments to provide WAN-optimized replication and to enable automated and seamless operations failover to a remote disaster recovery site.

FalconStor® Application Snapshot Director (ASD) for Oracle VM will bring application-consistent data protection to Oracle VM environments, guaranteeing transactional integrity to reduce recovery times and enable continuous data availability during storage or system failure. FalconStor® HyperTrac™ Backup Accelerator works with Oracle Secure Backup (OSB) to provide high-performance, zero-impact backups for Oracle VM servers by offloading backup processes from the virtual server.

“Data protection in virtual environments is the next great challenge for IT organizations, which are all turning to virtualization to consolidate operations and control costs,” said Bernie Wu, vice president of business development at FalconStor Software. “FalconStor’s solutions complete the virtual infrastructure puzzle by providing comprehensive data protection services. We integrate seamlessly with Oracle VM and work hand-in-hand with Oracle’s backup tools, including Oracle Secure Backup and Oracle Recovery Manager, to optimize the Oracle virtualization environment for efficiency and high availability.”

FalconStor is a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork.

[ends]

About the Oracle PartnerNetwork
Oracle PartnerNetwork is a global business network of more than 21,000 companies that deliver innovative software solutions based on Oracle software. Through access to Oracle´s premier products, education, technical services, marketing and sales support, the Oracle PartnerNetwork program provides partners with the resources they need to be successful in today´s global economy. Oracle partners are able to offer their customers leading-edge solutions backed by Oracle´s position as the world’s largest business software company. Partners who are able to demonstrate superior product knowledge, technical expertise and a commitment to doing business with Oracle qualify for the Certified Partner levels.

FalconStor Software, Inc. today announced that a large international life insurance company has deployed FalconStor® Virtual Tape Library (VTL) Enterprise Edition to optimize its backup performance across the company’s open systems, IBM System i and IBM System z (mainframe) environments. This heterogeneous enterprise-wide installation demonstrates FalconStor’s leadership in the VTL industry as the only vendor that can address all systems, from open systems in small to medium-size businesses to midrange servers and mainframes in large, distributed enterprises. FalconStor VTL connectivity to IBM System z is enabled by FalconStor’s longstanding collaboration with Bus-Tech, which plays an important role in this customer solution.

The FalconStor VTL solution helped the insurance company bridge the gap between its mainframe and open systems, reducing IT complexity while controlling explosive data growth. The solution alleviated backup window and reliability issues, lowered operation costs and allowed the company to provide superior continuous service to customers for the highest return on investment (ROI).

This customer’s experience further validates the results of a recent ROI customer survey sponsored by FalconStor and conducted by IDC, a leading global market intelligence and advisory firm. According to the survey, all customers who participated enjoyed considerable benefits from FalconStor solutions, including cost reductions, greater system availability and increased staff productivity (see footnote).

Based on IDC’s comprehensive survey metrics, the top three cost reductions that FalconStor solutions provide to end users result from (1) the ability to purchase cost-effective disk arrays from any vendor, (2) lower costs associated with tape and backup drives and (3) reduced new server purchases through decreased storage needs. According to the IDC ROI analysis, FalconStor customers:

• reduced tape drive costs by an average of $162,000 annually
• saved an average of $81,000 annually on storage hardware
• increased staff productivity equal to one full-time employee
• reduced the average number of critical system failures from 17 to 1 annually
• achieved 448 percent ROI with a payback period of 5.5 months

“FalconStor differentiates itself in the VTL market by offering a broader data protection platform including a strategy and product set that expands well beyond only tape emulation,” said Laura DuBois, research director, IDC Storage Software. “This strategy includes deduplication, encryption and mainframe connectivity, giving FalconStor VTL wide-ranging market appeal that provides meaningful ROI in data center environments of all sizes.”

“We built our leadership in the VTL market by creating the most comprehensive, high-performance solution for the broadest base of customers of any vendor in the industry. We help enterprises of all sizes address the single most critical issue in backup: meeting the backup window,” said ReiJane Huai, chairman and CEO of FalconStor Software. “IDC’s ROI study corroborates what we have already experienced firsthand – that our customers are solving significant data protection problems, architecting more efficient IT operations and achieving outstanding ROI with FalconStor solutions.”

The international insurance firm deployed FalconStor VTL throughout its three distributed data centers. In the IBM System z environment, they installed a high-availability (HA) pair of FalconStor VTL gateway appliances with a Sun STK 6140 disk array to ensure high-speed disk-based data protection. The IT team uses the Bus-Tech Mainframe Data Library model 100V, which allows the ESCON channel to connect with the IBM z and to process mainframe tape data to the industry-standard FalconStor VTL platform. The FalconStor VTL secure tape feature exports and encrypts mainframe tapes before shipping offsite for DR and vaulting.

“Bus-Tech’s Mainframe Data Library works with FalconStor VTL to provide our mainframe and distributed systems customers access to the rich feature set and benefits of FalconStor’s industry-leading virtual tape library solution,” said Ralph Armstrong, vice president of product management for Bus-Tech, Inc. “Companies in today’s economic climate are looking at ways to reduce cost. The ability to combine mainframe and distributed systems into a single converged data protection scheme is very attractive to a wide range of data center managers.”

In the IBM System i environment, the insurance company uses a similar HA configuration. The IBM i host can directly connect with the FalconStor VTL system via a Fibre Channel (FC) port. A disk array with high-capacity SATA disks can emulate an IBM 3590 or 3584 tape drive with the magnetic tape data storage media formats that are accepted by the IBM i. To accommodate the large volume of data in the open systems environment, IT deployed two HA pairs of FalconStor VTL while running Veritas NetBackup to protect Oracle, AWD, Microsoft SQL Server and Lotus Notes applications on both UNIX and Microsoft Windows Servers.

The customer experienced significant benefits from implementing the FalconStor VTL solution. FalconStor VTL combines concurrent processing power with high-speed FC disk arrays, which enables high throughput. Backup data streams are no longer limited by the number of tape drives in the tape library and multiple data streams can be processed simultaneously. This has accelerated the batch processing of the backup procedures and improved performance in the mainframe environment by 30 to 40 percent. In the open systems environment, backup time has been reduced by 50 percent. The HA configuration improves backup system reliability two-fold and minimizes failure rates, which in turn saves time and human resources.

To read about our customers deploying FalconStor VTL in mainframe and distributed systems environments, visit the case study library on the FalconStor website.

[ends]

Note: IDC white paper sponsored by FalconStor, Reducing Costs and Creating a More Secure IT Environment with a Holistic Approach to Data Protection: An ROI Analysis of FalconStor Storage Management Solutions, Laura duBois and Eric Hatcher, IDC #219707, August 2009. To download a copy of the IDC ROI analysis of FalconStor storage solutions, please click here.

FalconStor Software, Inc. and Avnet Technology Solutions (Avnet), a value-added IT distributor and an operating group of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), today announced that they have entered into an agreement for the distribution of FalconStor® software products by Avnet UK.

Avnet will be distributing the full range of FalconStor solutions, including FalconStor® Continuous Data Protector (CDP), FalconStor® Network Storage Server® (NSS), FalconStor® Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with deduplication and FalconStor® File-interface Deduplication System (FDS).

The products, which are already being distributed by Avnet in the Benelux, will be taken to market immediately by Avnet in the UK with other European countries following suit as and when appropriate.

“Avnet has a strong reputation in the channel and this is what made it such an attractive partnership for FalconStor,” said Guillaume Imberti, president and general manager of FalconStor´s EMEA operations. “Avnet’s market approach will allow our data protection solutions to find their way to many customers and solution providers striving for better data efficiency and protection. We believe that working with Avnet will strengthen our distribution reach throughout Europe.”

“FalconStor products fit well into our storage portfolio and address our partners’ goals. With the increasing volume of data, there’s more and more demand for storage virtualization and data protection,” said Mark Walker, EMEA director, Storage Product Business Group, Avnet Technology Solutions. “Together with FalconStor, we will jointly recruit resellers and solution providers to meet with the growing demand for FalconStor solutions.”

[ends]

About Avnet Technology Solutions
Avnet Technology Solutions is an operating group of Phoenix-based Avnet, Inc. As a global technology sales and marketing organization, Avnet Technology Solutions has sales divisions focused on specific customer segments and a select line card strategy enabling an exceptional level of attention to the needs of its customers and suppliers. For fiscal year 2008, the group served customers in more than 30 countries and generated US $7 billion in annual revenue.

About Avnet Inc.
Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), a Fortune 500 company, is one of the largest distributors of electronic components, computer products and embedded technology in the world. Avnet accelerates its partners’ success by connecting the world’s leading technology suppliers with a broad base of more than 100,000 customers and providing cost-effective, value-added services and solutions. For the fiscal year ended June 27, 2009, Avnet generated revenue of $16.23 billion.

New solutions for heterogeneous disaster recovery, storage virtualisation management and a deduplication virtual appliance expand FalconStor’s support for VMware vSphere 4

FalconStor today announced comprehensive offerings for supporting, enhancing and extending data protection in VMware vSphere™ 4 environments with new solution introductions and expansions. The initiative encompasses continuous availability, virtual storage management and a breadth of virtual appliance solutions – all three areas critical to maximizing the business value of virtual infrastructure deployments in heterogeneous environments.

At VMworld 2009, FalconStor is introducing new storage management and new disaster recovery (DR) extensions for VMware vCenter™ Server and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager that provide virtual machine storage provisioning as well as automated failback of remote virtual machines to the primary data center. Additionally, FalconStor is demonstrating its new FalconStor® File-interface Deduplication System Virtual Appliance (FDS VA) for easy-to-deploy data deduplication for VMware vSphere 4 environments.

“Managing separate point data protection solutions for a physical data center and for a virtual environment is challenging, complex and can be error prone,” said Dave Russell, Research Vice President, Storage Technologies and Strategies, at Gartner. “Companies should seriously consider storage virtualization and data protection solutions that are tightly integrated and can provide the same level of services for both physical and virtual infrastructures.”

Continuous availability: added features for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
FalconStor solutions provide continuous availability of physical and virtual as well as local and remote resources, giving IT managers comprehensive business continuity and DR coverage. FalconStor’s two new DR extensions for VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager automate failover of physical and virtual hosts to the DR site and provide automated failback support of virtualized servers from the DR site to the primary data center:

• FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS) – Extends VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager functionality across the data center by adding support for physical-to-virtual machine failover. This unique implementation dramatically speeds site-level failover and reduces DR costs.
• FalconStor® Failback Manager for VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager – Lets VMware vSphere™ 4 users automate the failback process to the primary data center in a single step once the restoration of data center services are complete. VMware and FalconStor customers can experience a single simplified function, accelerating return to normal operations and minimizing human error.

“With these new solutions for VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager, FalconStor continues its tradition of adding value in the area of data protection, business continuity and disaster recovery,” said Bernie Wu, vice president of business development for FalconStor Software. “The combination of our respective solutions is designed to lower costs and remove the barriers to deploy continuous availability in a VMware vSphere™ 4-enabled data center of any size.”

These new features complement FalconStor® Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, which integrates FalconStor’s replication capability with Site Recovery Manager. In addition, FalconStor’s replication technology provides replication and bandwidth efficiency over the WAN and supports heterogeneous infrastructures that require replication between multi-vendor SAN/DAS environments. FalconStor and VMware customers now have an alternative replication and DR solution when dealing with a mix of SAN/DAS vendors between primary and DR sites. Customers will find that Falconstor has built a complete set of DR solutions around the VMware platform that fits their budget and protection needs.

Continuous availability: added data protection, performance and efficiency
FalconStor solutions provide VMware customers with complete end-to-end continuous availability and backup protection as a critical component of the virtual data center. FalconStor enables backup optimization by completely eliminating the backup window and offloading backup operations from VMware production environments. In addition, FalconStor’s deduplication technology reduces the backup infrastructure needed to support VMware-enabled backup applications.

Additional FalconStor solutions for continuous availability include:

• Newly introduced FalconStor® File-interface Deduplication System Virtual Appliance (FDS VA) – Optimizes VMware backup infrastructure by eliminating redundancies in VMDK files and significantly reducing the storage capacity required to support VMware backup applications. This storage capacity optimization solution allows for longer retention time of backup online while reducing infrastructure costs thus improving the recoverability of VMware environments.
• FalconStor® HyperTrac™ VMware Edition – Provides impact-free backup of VMware environments through its tight integration with VMware Consolidated Backup and the VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection. It removes any performance impact on production environments by offloading the backup process of VMware virtual disk files (VMDKs) to a standby environment allowing virtual machine backup to proceed unimpeded and to scale to the largest VMware environments.

New FalconStor virtual storage management integration with VMware vCenter Server
FalconStor® Storage Manager for VMware vCenter™ Server extends FalconStor’s advanced storage management capabilities into VMware vCenter Server as a plug-in tool. Users can now create virtual machines with data stores allocated from storage managed by FalconStor software within the VMware vCenter management client. The FalconStor Storage Manager also enables users’ easy access to key features such as virtual machine replication, thin provisioning and storage migration. VMware and FalconStor customers can now leverage FalconStor’s multi-vendor storage virtualization management tools within VMware vCenter Server to further reduce storage management costs. FalconStor NSS provides primary storage virtualization well-suited for VMware vSphere™ 4 and is VMware Ready Certified. FalconStor NSS offers built-in snapshot data protection and mirroring and integrates with popular applications such as Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and Oracle Database running in virtual machines.

New FalconStor FDS VA creates breadth of virtual appliance solutions
FalconStor virtual appliances now support VMDirectPath I/O from VMware to provide high-performance storage access that increases the throughput of FalconStor NSS VA running on the VMware platform by tenfold. With the introduction of the FalconStor® FDS VA, FalconStor now offers its entire storage solution portfolio as a virtual appliance that runs on VMware ESX and VMware ESXi, including FalconStor® Virtual Tape Library (VTL), FalconStor® Continuous Data Protector (CDP) and FalconStor NSS. This extensive solution coverage brings a high level of storage virtualization and data protection services to VMware vSphere 4 customers.

FalconStor FDS VA includes a NAS interface allowing native backup tools provided by Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and Oracle Database to send disk-based backup files to FalconStor FDS VA for efficient deduplication. Unlike other deduplication technology, no modifications to VMware virtual machine guest operating systems or applications are required. FalconStor’s deduplication virtual appliance hosted on VMware vSphere™ 4 participates in FalconStor’s global deduplication technology, allowing remote and branch offices to offer thin replication to a centrally based FalconStor FDS repository saving valuable WAN resources.

FalconStor and VMware
As a VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program member, FalconStor has developed unique technologies to create value for VMware environments. Customers who are evaluating storage solutions for VMware environments should take into consideration such features as storage replication with built-in WAN acceleration, agnostic storage virtualization and next-generation backup/recovery for customers that use VMware vSphere™ 4.

Additionally, FalconStor integrates its solutions with the VMware vStorage capabilities and interfaces provided by the VMware platform to ensure a better end-user experience. FalconStor is an active innovator and contributor to the VMware partner ecosystem, with products available from the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace, products that integrate with VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager, VMware vCenter Server, and Storage Virtualization Device and Storage Array certifications.

Disk-based storage innovator and data protection leader team to deliver new Nexsan dedupe SG family to help customers eliminate eData redundancy and realise significant storage and energy savings

Nexsan Technologies and FalconStor today announced a strategic venture to deliver a joint solution, which has resulted in the delivery of an integrated deduplication product family for high-performance, power-efficient data storage. Based on Nexsan’s power-efficient storage systems and the FalconStor® File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) software, the new, Nexsan DeDupe SG (“Speed with Green”) product family will be delivered by Nexsan through its worldwide network of channel partners.

The cost of traditional storage solutions makes it difficult for organizations to efficiently backup and store their rapidly growing business and application data. Compounding this challenge are tight budgets which drive an increased demand for solutions that will improve operating efficiencies while meeting performance requirements. Nexsan and FalconStor have responded to this growing need with a reliable, disk-based storage product line which offers high-performance data deduplication that has been optimized for high density, power and cost efficiency.

“Nexsan and FalconStor have made a significant leap forward in the area of operating efficiency with the new Nexsan DeDupe SG,” said Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “The new self-optimizing capability of this product is very unique and will help companies realize benefits in both power and data efficiency while automating critical storage management processes.”

Storage deduplication systems are primarily used as backup targets, operating only during the backup window. Even though the typical backup window is less than eight hours a day, all other deduplication systems spin drives and burn energy for the remaining 16 hours, even while not in use. With Nexsan DeDupe SG, customers not only get higher capacity and better performance during their backups, they also save energy and reduce costs every hour that the system is not in use.

Nexsan DeDupe SG leverages the green efficiencies inherent to its industry-leading technology components: data reduction through high-speed deduplication, footprint reduction by utilizing space-efficient storage arrays, and substantial energy savings through AutoMAID technology. Nexsan DeDupe SG is the only high-performance, data deduplication solution with AutoMAID technology delivering “Speed with Green” to improve operational efficiency.

“The Nexsan DeDupe SG solution solves two very pressing customer needs — reducing capacity costs and improving operating efficiency,” said Michael McGuire, chief commercial officer for Nexsan. “With over 20 years of combined experience, FalconStor and Nexsan together continue their traditions of innovation by redefining deduplication and power efficiency and providing our global network of channel partners with a differentiated offering in one of the fastest growing market segments.”

FalconStor FDS, the deduplication engine for the Nexsan DeDupe SG family, is a block-level deduplication software solution that presents a network share interface as a backup repository, offering customers an easy-to-use, space-saving option for writing data efficiently and cost-effectively to disk. Nexsan DeDupe SG maximizes interoperability with all data sources, including disk-to-disk backup and archiving applications. It also can be deployed in any physical or virtual infrastructure environment, offering file-level access to a central block-level deduplication repository. Nexsan DeDupe SG uses policy-based concurrent and post-process deduplication methods for maximum flexibility. The product supports all major backup software, directly accepts Oracle RMAN, Microsoft SQL and other database dumps, and provides integrated data replication and deduplication.

“The Nexsan DeDupe SG system family offers the only solution that delivers both high-performance data deduplication and automated energy savings,” said Wendy Petty, vice president of North American Sales for FalconStor Software. “This FalconStor/Nexsan joint solution is focused on small-to-mid-sized enterprises but is attractive for all storage users. We are excited to offer this solution through Nexsan’s global channel network, leveraging their industry-leading closed channel lead registration model.”

“We see this joint solution as a win-win situation for the channel,” said Greg Knieriemen, vice president of Chi Corporation, a solutions provider specializing in data storage, backup and disaster recovery. “The combination of high-performance deduplication with the dramatic reduction of energy consumption makes this solution a ‘must have’ in nearly every IT environment concerned about reducing storage costs, power costs and the physical footprint for storage.”

Pricing and availability
The Nexsan DeDupe SG family is offered in six configurations and available immediately through Nexsan’s worldwide channel partner network starting at $49,000 U.S. To learn more about channel partner opportunities, visit Nexsan’s partner information site at http://www.nexsan.com/reseller_signup.php.

About Nexsan Technologies
Nexsan Corporation is a leading provider of energy-efficient, long-term storage systems. Nexsan delivers secure storage appliances and modular, capacity-optimized disk-storage systems for a broad range of applications including fixed-content storage and archiving, email, medical imaging, compliance and litigation support, disk-based backup, digital video security, and rich media. Nexsan’s solutions are the choice of small and medium-sized companies as well as large global enterprises and major governmental agencies around the world who are seeking cost-correct, high-density storage solutions. Founded in 1999 and based in Thousand Oaks, Calif., Nexsan sells its products exclusively through a select global network of VARs, OEMs and system integrators. For more information about Nexsan’s products, please see the company’s website at www.nexsan.com.