Both Barrels Communications Ltd

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.

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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 today announced that it delivers the fastest backup and deduplication time in the industry, through the FalconStor® Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with deduplication solution. Its latest performance exceeds all current published metrics from competing vendors.

In addition to reducing backup, deduplication and restore time through optimization, the FalconStor VTL solution’s ability to use Fibre Channel for replicating deduplicated data further reduces the total time to DR. A critical metric for assessing enterprise readiness for full recovery from data center failure, total time to DR is measured by the time required to back up a given amount of data, write it to tape, deduplicate it, replicate it to a remote DR site, and restore the data to full availability.

FalconStor staged a test of its latest version of FalconStor VTL with deduplication in order to validate the performance of FalconStor VTL in a real data center configuration and to demonstrate a best-practice scenario. Measured were key performance criteria, including ingest rate, tape production, deduplication throughput, replication and recovery time.

“Total time to DR is critical to the resilience of any business that relies on 24-hour access to important applications,” said Lauren Whitehouse, analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group. “A high-performance backup infrastructure is critical to reducing a business’s exposure to downtime by ensuring data recovery and full return to operability in a timely manner. FalconStor has clearly taken the entire process from backup to recovery into consideration to achieve optimal efficiency in terms of both time and cost.”

“Other data protection vendors with deduplication focus on reduction ratios and backup speeds but fail to take into consideration all the processes needed to complete the DR-readiness cycle, including replication off site and restoration of data into an application-ready state at the DR facility,” said Wayne Lam, FalconStor co-founder and vice president. “FalconStor considered the whole picture in designing FalconStor VTL to integrate with any backup system and to enable and optimize the entire sequence of events within a data protection system. In addition, the FalconStor VTL system can scale without disruption or complexity as the business grows.”

In the test bed of 100 terabytes of production data, the performance measured was achieved with a single cluster of two FalconStor VTL nodes supported by four deduplication nodes. Running the backup and deduplication processes concurrently, the total time to backup and deduplicate the 100 terabytes of data was under 14 hours, yielding an average of 2.0 gigabytes per second. In the case where minimizing the total backup time is the major goal, the two-node VTL cluster delivered 2.8 gigabytes per second of backup speed, requiring a backup window of under 10 hours for the 100 terabytes. Physical tape production can be achieved directly through 4 gigabit Fibre Channel links by exporting tapes from FalconStor VTL to the physical tape library without using a separate media server. All hardware components used for the performance test are commonly available standard parts, including standard Linux-based servers and low-cost SATA-based storage subsystems with 4 gigabit Fibre Channel ports.

FalconStor VTL can scale up to an eight-node cluster with an additional eight-node deduplication cluster managing a global, shared data repository that can hold more than two petabytes of physical capacity or 40 petabytes of logical (deduplicated) capacity. This massive scalability allows for consolidated management of a large enterprise’s data and data protection processes, reducing complexity, time, cost and risk related to managing a collection of discrete repositories, as required by other deduplication solutions. The solution’s clustered architecture ensures maximum availability and reduced downtime and its associated cost.

Beyond backup data processing, FalconStor VTL features high-performance IP and Fibre Channel replication designed to minimize the replication window and thus reduce the risk of associated data loss. In addition to replicating backup data, FalconStor VTL includes a backup media server catalogue replication feature that guarantees continuous consistency of the backup media catalogue at the primary and the DR site to accelerate restoration of data to full operation. Once data is replicated to the DR site, FalconStor VTL enables high-speed restore of deduplicated data at a sustained rate that exceeds 1.2 gigabytes per second per node, demonstrating the fastest restore performance in the industry from a deduplicated repository; at this speed a 100 TB data set can be restored in less than 12 hours.

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About FalconStor Software, Inc.
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, COPAN Systems, Data Direct Networks, Dynamic Solutions International, EMC, IBM, Pillar Data Systems, Spectra Logic and Sun 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. FalconStor is an active member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). For more information, visit www.falconstor.com.

FalconStor, FalconStor Software and IPStor are registered trademarks and TOTALLY Open is a trademark 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.

FalconStor today announced a new file-interface data deduplication system along with enhancements and support for high-performance connectivity to its widely deployed Virtual Tape Library (VTL) software.

With the addition of a file interface to FalconStor’s deduplication product line, customers can choose either a file interface or a VTL interface or both, depending on data center requirements. FalconStor’s new file-interface deduplication system is a block-level deduplication solution that presents a network share interface as a backup repository, offering customers another space-saving option for writing data efficiently and cost-effectively to disk. In addition, small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs) receive simple, efficient disk-to-disk backup and replication capabilities that reduce cost and improve the bottom line.

“FalconStor’s introduction of a file-interface deduplication system is important both for FalconStor and for its customers,” said Eric Burgener, senior analyst at The Taneja Group. “It brings FalconStor’s industry-leading D2D backup technology, more widely deployed than any other through their various OEM and indirect channels, to an entirely new space: NAS-based D2D backup. This promises to shake things up for existing NAS D2D vendors and extends the benefits of FalconStor’s highly scalable deduplication technology to a new customer base that values many of the same features that made FalconStor the industry leader in the VTL arena.”

The industry’s number-one selling VTL solution, FalconStor® VTL software now offers high-performance 10-Gigabit iSCSI and Qualified 8-Gigabit Fibre Channel connectivity to backup applications for faster, more cost-efficient backups that meet the requirements of an ever shrinking backup window. In addition, FalconStor VTL now offers customers a host of enhancements, including greater integration with Veritas NetBackup OpenStorage from Symantec on various operating systems, real-time performance statistics, tape caching with deduplication, enhanced repository management and replication, and additional library and tape-drive emulation.

With its qualification for high-performance 8-Gigabit Fibre Channel connectivity, FalconStor VTL 5.1 systems can now scale in performance up to 1.5 gigabytes/sec per node – with up to 8 nodes per each single logical deployment of VTL. This extends FalconStor VTL’s backup capability up to 43 terabytes per hour for each VTL deployment, speeding up backup to accommodate shrinking backup windows and reducing expenses by consolidating backup operations and reducing the physical system footprint in the data center.

Both the file-interface and VTL-interface deduplication solutions are based on FalconStor software’s open architecture, which gives end users highly optimized, integrated and available data protection within their current infrastructure. FalconStor’s solutions fit easily into and enhance backup environments without disruption, enabling customers to reduce disk storage, accelerate backup processes and shorten recovery times. In addition, FalconStor’s file-interface deduplication system can be deployed in any physical or virtual infrastructure environment offering file-level access to a central block-level single-instance repository. 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’s file-interface deduplication system accepts data from standard network backup solutions and database backup utilities; key capabilities include:

• CIFS and NFS file interface for block-level deduplication
• Immediate file-level access to deduplication repository
• Application-aware: optimized for third-party backup software
• Many-to-one replication capability included for global deduplication
• Available as Virtual Appliance on leading server virtualization platforms

“Like our popular VTL with deduplication software, the file-interface deduplication system is designed to ease into any backup environment without disruption and to dramatically reduce storage consumption,” said Alex Jiang, vice president of worldwide marketing for FalconStor. “It is yet another solution from FalconStor that helps IT managers at small companies and large enterprises alike do more with less during a time when organizations are evaluating technologies that can help cut IT expenses.”

FalconStor’s file-interface deduplication system is currently in beta testing with general availability scheduled in the first quarter of 2009. As a traditional software package ready for installation on any hardware appliance with replication included, U.S. list price starts at $13,000. As a virtual appliance without replication, U.S. list starts at $5,000, plus $2,000 for the replication option.

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FalconStor, FalconStor Software, and IPStor are registered trademarks, and TOTALLY Open is a trademark 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.