FalconStor

FalconStor v7 Reveals Service Oriented Data Protection Story

2011-08-22T10:00:00Z

"Yeah, we do that." That's the response many software providers of storage virtualization give when asked if they can offer a specific storage function. But that "Can do" attitude reveals the heart of the problem of these providers: they end up acquiring a "jack of all trades, master of none" reputation. Today FalconStor Software still answers, "Yeah, we do that," but now provides a more well articulated service-oriented data protection story to complement its storage solutions.

FalconStor Software as much as any provider of storage virtualization software personifies the perception of it being a "jack-of-all-trades." Its underlying storage virtualization technology has given FalconStor the flexibility to adapt to changing market demands and bring new products to market. A quick review of its website reveals to be true as it offers the following solutions:

FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP)
FalconStor File-interface Deduplication System (FDS, its network attached deduplication disk library)
FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS, storage virtualization software)
FalconStor Virtual Tape Library (VTL)

But with that flexibility sometimes the message as to how its suite of solutions can help enterprises gets lost in the mix.

Today FalconStor Software begins to change its story on a number of fronts with is release of V7. Over the last 18 months FalconsSor has invested a significant amount of time and energy to first test each of its solutions and then ensure they are first easier to deploy and then use by its customers as it ran thousands of tests (7,000 according to FalconStor) to make sure they are easier to deploy and manage.

FalconStor has also changed its release strategy for new products and features. Prior to publicly announcing any new product or feature, it is doing longer betas with existing customers. In this way when a new product or feature is announced, it has customers who can speak to their experiences with the product or feature and are not leaving prospective customers with questions as to how easy it is to implement.

A prime example of this is that as FalconStor publicly announces FalconStor V7, it is also making an enterprise customer available (Sunrise Communications of Zurich, Switzerland) who can testify to how it uses FalconStor in its environment. Sunrise uses most of FalconStor's software (CDP, FDS, NSS & VTL) in its environment to accomplish objectives such as delivering on SLAs, failing over 100's of VMs in seconds, offering a comprehensive recovery solution and uniformly managing all of its products.

This poignantly illustrates how FalconStor has changed its story in another important way. Rather than just saying, "Yeah, we can do that," it now says, "Yeah, we can solve that problem and here is how you can build on our technology to address multiple issues in your environment."

In that vein FalconStor provides more guidance as to which of its solutions organizations should implement first so they can optimize the current backup processes with VTL and FDS to initiate disk-based backup and data deduplication.

Once these issues are resolved, FalconStor can point organizations to its NSS and CDP solutions to implement business continuity and disaster recovery issues, especially in VMware environments where there is a mix of physical and virtual servers. Then using its RecoverTrac technology, which is integrated into both CDP and NSS, customers can deploy service-oriented DR, by organizing and automating failover and failback of complete IT services such as what Sunrise Communications is already experiencing.

But maybe what FalconStor has most importantly done with this release is to give organizations a hint of the type of synergies that they may see by using FalconStor's data protection suite as a foundation for service-oriented data protection.

By way of example, FalconStor FDS and VTL solutions will for the first time store their data in the same back end repository and have it globally deduplicated. The decision to start capitalizing on the synergies of these two products goes back to the order of problems it is first trying to solve in customer environments - namely backup and recovery.

By enabling its FDS and VTL solutions to share the same repository and globally deduplicate data, organizations can now deploy the most appropriate solution in their environment (FDS at remote and branch offices, VTL in the home office) and then replicate and store the data from these two interfaces in the same back end data repository. This approach centralizes data management even as it reduces the amount of data under management.

But this consolidation also hints at what else FalconStor might be able to accomplish longer term. If it can centrally store the data behind its FDS and VTL interfaces in one central repository and then centrally manage them, what is to stop it from extending that same functionality to its CDPand NSS solutions?

After all, they are all built on the same underlying technology and, while there are specific performance and scalability concerns associated with each interface, it does create some interesting possibilities as to where FalconStor might go with its portfolio of solutions in the future.

In one sense today is no different than yesterday in terms of what products that FalconStor offers. FalconStor still offers its CDP, FDS, NSS and VTL solutions just as it always has with some added bells and whistles that any new product release will include.

But what is fundamentally different about FalconStor is how it is crafting and telling its story. No longer is it just "Yeah, we do that" type of provider. FalconStor now provides its solutions while endeavoring to minimize or even eliminate the setup associated with deploying them.

At the same time, FalconStor is also delivering a definitive roadmap for its customers as to how they can best leverage its technologies. In so doing, they can deploy them at the right time when it makes the most sense for them even as FalconStor provides some hints as to what synergies organizations might glean from using FalconStor exclusively across their environment.

FalconStor's New RecoverTrac Technology Puts the Frosting on the Disaster Recovery Cake

2011-02-08T14:00:00Z

Ask any organization if they want a disaster recovery (DR) solution and the answer is almost always a "Yes." But then rephrase the question and ask, "Are they willing to invest a lot of time and money to test, implement and continually verify that a DR solution works as intended?" Put that way, it is not unusual for that organization to hem and haw before finally responding with a "No."

It is for that reason that most vendors only ask organizations if they want to purchase a DR solution. It is not until after organizations buy a so-called DR solution do they find that all they have obtained is the components to do DR. They still lack the expertise that they need in order to implement it and the framework needed to manage it.

In explaining this situation to one individual, I compared today's DR solutions to a cake without the frosting. DR solutions today are certainly more than the ingredients that one needs to make a cake such as the butter, eggs, flour, milk and sugar. But from the perspective of the organization buying the DR solution, what they end up with is an unfrosted cake that comes delivered with a set of instructions.

This set of instructions tells them how to frost and decorate the cake. But if they do not want to frost and decorate it, their only option is to call a cake decorator (i.e. professional services) to frost it for them.

That's great for the few organizations that actually have the time and/or money to configure a DR solution. But many do not. It is for these reasons that so few organizations actually have implemented a working DR solution despite already having some of the frame work in place to make it work.

This situation was in part the impetus behind FalconStor's introduction of the RecoverTrac technology that it has now added to its Continuous Data Protector (CDP) software. RecoverTrac in essence makes the components (replication and snapshots) of DR solutions useable by rolling the implementation, testing and the ongoing management of its snapshot and replication into an appliance that can be installed into today's enterprise environments.

At a high level, RecoverTrac:

Leverages existing FalconStor CDP software to create application consistent snapshots and then replicate the data to the DR site. FalconStor CDP does the application consistent snapshots, creates up to 255 snapshots per protected volume and then replicates the data to another site.

Automates the implementation and ongoing management of DR. Configuring the snapshots and replication of data between two sites normally takes a knowledgeable individual with a high level of expertise to complete these tasks. RecoverTrac eliminates the need for this. Now an administrator can go into the RecoverTrac's GUI and configure FalconStor CDP to take snapshots of applications at the production site and then replicate that data to the DR site. Further, the administrator can set policies so CDP snapshots and replication continue to occur automatically.

Automates the recovery at the DR site. Automating the recovery of production applications (physical or virtual) and the resources that they need to recover (networking and storage) at the DR site is what defines a true DR solution. This is the true value of RecoverTrac.

In addition to supporting physical-to-physical (P2P,) physical-to-virtual (P2V,) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) machine recoveries, RecoverTrac also manages and automates the other functions that are needed to automate DR. This includes giving organizations the ability to reassign network IPs, provision and boot physical and virtual machines at the DR site and even set policies so they boot in the right order and understand application dependencies on other servers.

By way of example, it is common in enterprises for there to be dependencies between different application servers. In this scenario, when an application server comes up, it by default looks for another application server as part of its boot process as it gets or receives data from that other application server. If that other application server upon which it has a dependency is not already operational, then the application on this server can fail to start. RecoverTrac helps to prevent these situations by verifying the first application server is operational before initiating the recovery of any servers that have a dependency on that first application server.

Successfully implementing a DR solution has never been an easy task. But what has added to the difficulty of successfully implementing it is that vendors have glossed over the complexity of DR and presented replication as DR. However anyone who has ever tried to treat snapshots and replication as DR knows that it is like buying a cake without the frosting - it is incomplete and almost unusable.

It is this problem that the new RecoverTrac technology in FalconStor CDP addresses. FalconStor recognized that snapshots and replication are only foundational building blocks in creating a service-oriented architecture, not the end result. By layering RecoverTrac into its CDP software, Falconstor does more than make snapshots and replication practical to use as part of a DR solution. FalconStor makes DR a manageable, viable and workable strategy for any organization.

45 Minute Recovery is what Sold the Rug Doctor on CDP

2010-11-18T11:00:00Z

Sometimes it is difficult to put a price tag on "peace of mind" especially as it relates to having the confidence that application data can be recovered regardless of the scope of the disaster. But today more IT administrators are finding that elusive peace of mind. One such individual is Bill Ellis, the IT Infrastructure Manager for the Rug Doctor, Inc., whose confidence in his ability to recover data got a huge boost after testing and implementing the FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP) solution.

Most IT managers can probably relate to the situation that Ellis was confronting earlier this year. Managing backups was just one of the many tasks that he has to daily perform in his role as IT infrastructure Manager for the Rug Doctor. So while backing up 23 virtual machines and a few physical servers did not consume all of his time, it minimally consumed an hour of his time each day and, on days when file restores were needed, another 1 - 2 hours could be shot.

However what prompted his interest in finding a new backup solution for his environment was the amount of time it was taking to backup his Lotus Notes Domino server. It was taking 48 hours to do a full backup of this application and, since the Rug Doctor has offices in Plano, TX, as well in the UK, when employees were coming to work in the UK on Monday morning (which was 2 am CST in Dallas) backups of the email server had still not finished which was interfering with their work.

Further aggravating his problem, to do a full, verifiable backup of his Lotus Notes Domino server required that he take the email application offline. Long term this situation was untenable as employees could not send or receive email using their corporate mail server until the backup was complete.

So Ellis began to evaluate a number of backup solutions but was put off by the first two products that caught his eye as he had to make an investment in their software and/or hardware before he could deploy either of these solutions. Further, he wanted to replicate data off-site for disaster recovery which these solutions did not offer.

He then ran across Global Data Vault and its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) offering which is based on the FalconStor CDP solution. Unlike the other offerings he had evaluated, the FalconStor CDP solution was part of a managed service offering from Global Data Vault so there was no upfront investment in hardware or software - he only had to pay a monthly subscription fee.

To test the effectiveness of this solution, Ellis first used it to backup up his two largest application servers - his Lotus Notes Domino server with 850 GBs of data and his company file server which had 1.2 TBs of data on it. He completed the installs of the FalconStor CDP software on these servers in 15 minutes and then rebooted them.

Once the servers came up the FalconStor CDP immediately started backing them up. These backups completed without any issues and restores of files and email mailboxes from these backups also occurred without incident.

Ellis then wanted to see if he quickly he could build a fail over server should he loose an application server (physical or virtual.) To perform this task, he built a test server, put the FalconStor software on it, backed it up and then turned it off. He then built another server, got the install CD and rebuilt that test server in less than 45 minutes using the FalconStor recovery CD.

This portion of the testing revealed to Ellis that recovering any server in his environment using FalconStor could now for the most part be done in an hour or less. He says, "The concept is the same regardless of how much data a server has. You build a virtual machine (VM), mount the CD, hit the rebuild button and you are off to the races. The ease and speed of recovery are what sold me on FalconStor."

Having been convinced of FalconStor's value proposition, he used the same argument when he presented the solution to the Rug Doctor's CIO. He explained that the Rug Doctor only had a staff of 3 people so if something happened to the building, trying to rebuild all of the application servers in 24 hours was inconceivable using their current tape backup methodology.

So the return on investment (ROI) associated with using Global Data Vault and FalconStor was twofold. Yes, there were savings associated with eliminating tape and offsite tape storage costs.

But just as important, the Rug Doctor now had the confidence that its backups were completing successfully and, because Global Data Vault also acted as a Managed Service Provider (MSP), the Rug Doctor's data was automatically replicated to its offsite data center. This provided the Rug Doctor the additional level of confidence that it could recover its application servers almost anywhere and within 24 hours even in a worst case scenario.

Very few IT Managers that I know look forward to becoming or have the time to become backup experts. Rather most just want backup and recovery to be "check boxes" that they can daily "mark off" as complete so they can get on to the more pressing tasks that they have before them.

The Rug Doctor's Ellis is no different. By implementing the FalconStor CDP solution provided to him by Global Data Vault, he got the peace of mind that he was seeking in regards to having confidence that his backups were completing successfully. But just as important, he eliminated his backup windows (since CDP requires no backup window), he got the offsite, anywhere, anytime recovery his business needed and he and his staff got back the numerous hours that they were daily spending on a task that was adding minimal to no intrinsic value to the Rug Doctor's business.

New HP - FalconStor Agreement Provides Mid-Sized Companies with Verifiable Disaster Recovery Solution

2010-11-15T11:00:00Z

The confidence that mid-sized companies exhibit in their ability to successfully recover from disasters is remarkable in light of the lack of evidence that there is to support it. Recent surveys have uncovered that this confidence is often misplaced and may even be setting them up for some nasty surprises down the road. So for those who are ready to put in place a verifiable disaster recovery (DR) plan, the recently announced managed services and reseller agreement between HP Enterprise Services and FalconStor Software may provide the solution they need.

A report that came out in late 2009 that surveyed 1650 small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) revealed that 82% of them were somewhat or very satisfied with their disaster recovery plans while 84% felt somewhat or very protected in the event a disaster struck. However that same report also found that only 23% of them backup their data on a daily basis and that over half of them do not have a plan to deal with disasters such as virus or hacker attacks, power outages or natural disasters.

A separate study of 1200 mid-sized companies that was completed in 2008 found that 70% of these companies view disaster recovery (DR) capabilities as "essential" to their business. Yet in this same report less than 25% of those companies in that same survey expressed confidence that their DR strategy would work.

Now one and two years have respectively passed since these studies were completed and, in that time, one has to wonder if companies are really any better positioned to successfully execute on a DR plan than they were when these surveys were conducted.

One could certainly see why these companies think they are. The technologies that they have at their fingertips to do backup have gotten both better and more economical when one considers that:

The introduction of disk into the backup process has increased the speed and reliability of backups to unmatched levels
Deduplicating backup data makes it easier, faster and more economical to replicate data offsite
Server virtualization makes it possible to recover application servers almost anywhere on any hardware platform
The cost of networking, server, and storage hardware continues to decrease even as these technologies offer more capacity and performance

Yet completing backup jobs successfully and spending less time managing backups does not automatically translate into a successful DR plan. All it does is set the stage for these size organizations to put one in place.

It is for these reasons that the new managed services relationship and reseller agreement between HP Enterprise Services and FalconStor Software makes so much sense as this relationship offers the following:

Heterogeneous replication technology. Using the FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS), HP BCRS can offer SMBs a large number of new backup and replication options. For instance, they can use the NSS to virtualize existing storage capacity, configure it for backup and then replicate the backup data offsite. Alternatively if they are already using a disk based backup target, they can create a disk-to-disk-to-disk (D2D2D) configuration where data is initially first backed up to their existing disk backup solution and then copied to the NSS which can they replicate the data to another site.
Leverage HP BCRS data centers as offsite replication targets. One of the problems with replicating data offsite is the need to first have a secondary data center to which to replicate the data. As HP BCRS maintains 60 data centers in 40 countries around the world, SMBs can use the FalconStor to enable service to replicate data to these sites.
Expertise. Replicating data offsite sound simple in theory but it is complex to setup and manage on an ongoing basis. HP Enterprise Services can provide the initial expertise that SMBs need to initially configure the FalconStor NSS replication and then manage it on an ongoing basis.

SMBs need to be careful not to overestimate their abilities to recover data in the event of a disaster. Backups that complete successfully and on time do not automatically translate into a working and verifiable DR plan. Only by putting in place a solution such as the FalconStor NSS that actually replicates backup data offsite which is first configured and then managed by experts such as what HP Enterprise Services offers can they verify that they have a workable DR solution.

Storage Virtualization Has Finally Found Its Perfect Match in the Form of Desktop Virtualization

2010-08-24T10:00:00Z

Ever since storage virtualization solutions from providers such as FalconStor first appeared on the scene nearly a decade ago, they have been actively on the lookout for a problem where they function as the killer app. Over the years storage virtualization solutions have frequently been adapted (CDP, NAS, VTL, etc.) to function in specific ways but until now it really has not been viewed as the perfect fit for any specific application. But now thanks to the rapidly growing adoption of desktop virtualization technologies such as VMware View in organizations, storage virtualization may have finally found its perfect match.

Desktop virtualization is a technology that I was a big believer in as far back as 1996 when I first deployed it at a police department where I used to work as a system administrator. However shortly after adopting it the limitations of the technology quickly became apparent to me. While it pretty much worked as advertised, it did not scale very well and it was best suited for a small number of end users who only used it to run the most basic of desktop applications.

Fast forward to today and enterprises are actively talking about roll-outs of desktop virtualization technology to not tens, hundreds or thousands of users but to tens and even hundreds of thousands of users. These types of conversations indicate that desktop virtualization technology has progressed to the point where even power users are comfortable running applications on virtualized desktops.

This is all good news to corporate management. Desktop virtualization addresses their growing concerns regarding the deployment and management of desktops and laptops as it minimizes the hardware and software costs associated with deploying, managing and maintaining them. Further, it centralizes the storage of user data so there are fewer concerns about data loss plus it creates new options for data protection and recovery. It is for reasons like these that corporate interest in its adoption is piqued.

However reports of storage problems are surfacing in the early deployments of desktop virtualization. As organizations consolidate desktops using VMware, they are encountering enterprise like storage problems. One commonly cited problem is the 8:00 am boot storm that occurs when thousands of users log on first thing in the morning. Some organizations reporting slowed user response times that last 30 - 60 minutes that is usually only solved with the deployment of very expensive solid state drives (SSDs).

Yet another commonly reported problem that desktop virtualization creates is a new need to economically scale out these back end storage systems. Consolidating all of this data that was once on desktops and laptops creates unprecedented storage requirements for data that whose value to the organization is sometimes deemed dubious at best. Yet supporting it requires storage systems that scale-out and adequately protect it. Needless to say, these systems are not cheap.

So this is the dichotomy that enterprises are running into: they need very specialized storage systems that scale-out to large storage capacities and can deliver high levels of performance. But at the same time organizations are accustomed to paying $50 - $100 for the internal hard disk drives (HDDs) that are found in desktops and are in no hurry in this economy to spend more just because they are adopting VMware View. If anything, they want to spend the same amount of money and ideally less.

Until now the storage industry really has had no response. But that starts to change with today's announcement from FalconStor regarding its Network Storage Server (NSS) SAN Accelerator for VMware View.

Making the FalsonStor NSS particularly well suited for VMware View is that it delivers the enterprise characteristics that organizations want their storage solution for their newly virtualized desktops to have: high levels of availability, reliability, performance and storage capacity. But what makes it stand out from the crowd is that organizations can get these storage features a price point at or even below what organizations pay now for hard drives in individual desktops and laptops.

A particularly desirable feature on the FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator is its support of SSDs. While FalconStor has supported SSDs for some time, FalconStor has now extended that support to VMware View environments so it can provide the performance boost that VMware Views users need when they are booting up first thing in the morning. But because the NSS is also a storage virtualization engine, it also gives users the flexibility to use any tier of storage from any vendor that they want.

The FalconStor NSS also has many proven data protection technologies including snapshots, thin clones and replication. These features can then also all be deployed transparently and without impact to the end-users. But maybe best of all, there is every reason for enterprise organizations to believe that using all of the native capabilities that are found in FalconStor NSS they can eventually drive their cost per user for storage down to under $50/user without sacrificing capacity or performance.

Storage virtualization has for a long time been an answer searching for a problem. The enterprise storage challenges that desktop virtualization solutions such as VMware View create may be just the ticket to unlocking the pent-up value that has been building in storage virtualization solutions such as FalconStor NSS.

The one big edge that FalconStor NSS has over other storage system solutions is its flexibility in giving users the option to select any tier of storage that they want. While up to this point this flexibility has been minimized because cost was not always the overriding concern when used with business critical applications, cost is emerging as THE differentiator in desktop virtualization deployments, especially if it can deliver all of the other enterprise features that users are seeking.

It is for this reason that it appears that storage virtualization is more than just a perfect match for desktop virtualization. Desktop virtualization may finally be the app that makes FalconStor NSS and storage virtualization a must-have technology and one that is strategic in the eyes of enterprise organizations.

If you would like to learn how to get a better handle on the economies of scale that a virtualized storage infrastructure provides and how FalconStor helps organizations size it for VDI environment so as to weather the frequent I/O storms that occur in them, I encourage you to check out a blog entry by Fadi Albatal where he goes into greater detail on how FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator for VMware View can provide these features.

FalconStor® HyperFS™ Creates New Performance and Scalability Benchmarks for Private Storage Clouds

2010-04-13T10:00:00Z

Call them what you will - private storage clouds; distributed, shared file systems; or file system platforms - the bottom line is that these deliver what many companies now want more than ever: cost-effective, easy to manage and easy to deploy storage solutions for their burgeoning data stores. But this is where the similarities can end as the differences between them can be significant, especially when it comes to the abilities of these storage systems to perform and scale. It is these specific concerns that the new HyperFS™ file system from FalconStor is intended to address.

FalconStor's HyperFS file system breaks new ground in many ways, not the least of which is that it is an entirely new context in which to view FalconStor as a storage provider. Over the last few years, FalconStor has primarily been associated with the data protection market with its suite of products that include its Continuous Data Protector (CDP), File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) and Virtual Tape Library (VTL) software.

HyperFS casts FalconStor in a new light. While FalconStor still plans to support and develop its existing lines of data protection software, the HyperFS file system clearly moves FalconStor into the realm of an enterprise private storage cloud provider for the following two reasons:

HyperFS file system scales to unprecedented heights. HyperFS is a distributed file system that scales to a supportable 144 PBs. I say supportable because while other file systems such as ZFS claim to be able to scale into the exabytes, that is currently not a supportable configuration since that file system requires 128-bit hardware which is not yet available. HyperFS is however based upon a 64-bit architecture which is supported across the spectrum (operating systems, file system software and hardware) so it can scale to support 144 PBs in a single file system.

HyperFS file system is designed to perform. HyperFS can do more than just scale - lots of private storage clouds claim to do that - it can also perform. One of the characteristics of a distributed file system (and of HyperFS) is that it can support both NAS and SAN environments by introducing a metadata server to support them.

This metadata server (known as the MDS Server in HyperFS parlance) in essence behaves as a traffic cop, acting as a file server for NAS and a volume manager for SAN for all of the clients (Linux, Windows and Mac) that access the HyperFS storage pool.

Which protocol the client uses will hinge upon the performance requirements of the application it hosts. If the application just needs access to a large storage pool but has less intensive performance requirements, the client can access storage over HyperFS's NAS (CIFS/NFS) interface.

However if the application on the client needs better performance, an MDS agent is installed on the client that gives the client's application direct access to the storage. In this environment, the client first checks with the MDS server to find out where the file is located in the HyperFS-managed pool of storage.

Once it receives those instructions from the MDS server, it then accesses that data via standard block protocols such as fibre channel (FC), iSCSI or Infiniband. During its testing and based upon feedback from early adopters, FalconStor has found that organizations can achieve data rates that reach 90-95% of the physical buses of these protocols.

While HyperFS will likely have multiple applications long term in the near term it is specifically targeting the rich media entertainment market as well as the high performance computing (HPC), life sciences and oil and gas industries. These industries are the ones that are currently in the greatest need of storage platforms that can scale, perform and support heterogeneous environments.

HyperFS's support of the Mac OS is one of the primary reasons that FalconStor anticipates making substantial inroads into the rich media entertainment industry. Since so much of film production is done using the Mac OS, this entire industry is looking for a storage platform that meets this specific need.

FalconStor's introduction of HyperFS helps to further validate the world of private storage clouds that is rapidly taking shape. However HyperFS is not just another "me too" private storage cloud offering. FalconStor's tradition of delivering enterprise solutions that will both scale and perform makes the HyperFS file system a platform that merits attention in the months and years to come.

FalconStor and Violin Memory Just Made It Easier to Cost Justify the Deployment of SSDs

2010-03-02T19:00:00Z

No one disputes that solid state drives (SSDs) are poised to play a larger role in networked storage environments. But with the price per terabyte (TB) of SSDs still running a factor of 10-15x greater than high performance FC and SAS drives, the ROI for SSD has to be pretty clear for an organization to justify its deployment. Providing that justification for SSDs should now get a little easier thanks to a new solution announced today from FalconStor Software and Violin Memory.

A recent article on the Network Computing website observes that performance is the main reason why enterprises plan to adopt SSDs. Early adopters of SSD have seen application response times drop by 50 - 100% or more. This is primarily the result of IOPS (I/Os per second) increasing from less than 200 IOPS using FC or SAS hard disk drives (HDDs) to as much as 20,000 IOPS or more using SSDs.

But the main reason why organizations hold off on their deployment of SSDs is that these 100-fold increases in performance that SSDs can deliver come with about a 10-fold increase in cost. Further, those applications that can take advantage of SSDs performance generally do not need to keep all of their application data on SSD at the same time.

Keeping 1 - 5% of their most active data on SSD will deliver the majority of the benefits that these applications need at a fraction of the cost of storing all of the application data on SSD. The trick is finding a solution that will enable organizations to accomplish that objective. This is what the solution that the new alliance between FalconStor Software and Violin Memory provides.

The foundation for this alliance is built upon the FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) that can virtualize any external or internal tier of storage, including SSD. This virtualized storage capacity can then be presented to an application server.

One of FalconStor NSS's unique capabilities is its HotZone feature, which creates a "hot zone" from SSD disk it has virtualized. This "hot zone" is then used to pre-stage actively read data by copying active application data from disk to this "hot zone" on the NSS appliance. Since the data is only copied to the "hot zone", once the data is no longer needed by the application, the NSS deletes it from the "hot zone" to free its space for the active data for that application or others.

This high performance cache also serves another function - a write cache. Using FalconStor NSS's SafeCache feature in this capacity, organizations can expedite the performance of write-intensive applications by first staging write I/Os to the SSD cache and then de-staging them to disk over a period of time.

FalconStor NSS's SAN acceleration capability solved this initial problem of speeding up reads and writes for performance intensive applications while eliminating the need to put all of the application data on SSD. However, using SSD that was internal to FalconStor NSS results in some limitations including:

Service disruption. Placing SSDs inside a FalconStor NSS appliance is supported but this configuration requires organizations to take NSS offline if it is already in production.
Scalability. FalconStor NSS only has a limited number of internal slots so it is difficult to add more SSDs to the NSS should application needs for SSDs increase.
Performance and cost. Organizations could overcome this scalability issue by placing SSDs in traditional external storage systems, virtualize them using NSS and then use NSS to configure these SSDs as the "hot zone". However, using external SSDs increases their cost and slows performance since the "hot zone" I/O traffic has to cross a FC connection and access the SSD within the storage system.

These problems are what the new solution from FalconStor and Violin Memory address. By connecting FalconStor NSS directly to a Violin 1010 Flash Memory Appliance via PCI-Express, organizations get all of the benefits that NSS offers without the limitations inherent to internal SSDs. These benefits include:

Hot-swap SSDs. SSDs within the Violin 1010 are hot-swappable so if an existing SSD fails, administrators can swap out the failed SSD with a new one without taking the NSS appliance offline.
Economical, non-disruptive scaling. Organizations can start out with a Violin 1010 sized to meet their current needs but then non-disruptively scale it up to as much as 8 TBs.
No performance degradation for the NSS "hot zone". By connecting the Violin 1010 to the NSS via a PCI-Express connection, there is almost no performance degradation for reads or writes. This gives the NSS access to a "hot zone" that performs almost as fast as memory.

Organizations are looking to take advantage of the performance of SSDs but do not want to break the bank in the process. This new solution from FalconStor and Violin Memory enables them to do exactly this. They can keep their existing storage systems but put SSD in front of them by using FalconStor NSS and the Violin 1010. In so doing, organizations can accelerate application performance by only having active application data on SSD while keeping their costs under control at the same time.

The FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator solution from FalconStor also makes it possible for organizations to do more than cost justify SSDs for a few applications. Organizations can now extend the benefits of SSD to far more applications than they could before, use more low cost storage to store inactive data and, in the process, markedly lower the overall cost of storage in their network infrastructure while increasing the performance of all of their applications that use this solution.

FalconStor FDS Delivers on the New Prerequisites of Disk-based Backup 2.0

2010-01-20T11:00:00Z

Right now deduplication and replication are the two main features seen as critical to delivering on the promise of disk-based backup. But as organizations store more of their backup data to disk, they are quickly realizing that other features are required to successfully execute on the redesign of their backup infrastructures. Specifically, companies with numerous remote offices are finding that systems availability and data management cannot be overlooked in their disk-based backup redesigns and is what today's release of FalconStor's File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) 2.0 is intended to address.

It is no secret that deduplication and replication are becoming inextricable linked with disk-based backup. But as organizations deploy disk-based backup in conjunction with deduplication and replication, they are finding that it is not quite enough to solve all of their problems. Disk solves their immediate tactical problems of successfully completing backups more quickly; deduplication reduces their backup data stores; and, replication moves the backup data offsite. But as organizations scale out these solutions, they are encountering new challenges with managing and recovering this data.

Two specific concerns that have emerged include:

The availability of the disk-based backup solution. Many disk-based backup solutions are based upon single controller architectures that keep the upfront costs associated with disk-based backup low in remote and branch office. However when replicating this backup data to a central target, this target needs to remain constantly available both to receive the incoming replicated data and be ready to act as a standby unit should an appliance in a remote or brand office go off-line.
Better centralized management of the backup data. As organizations centralize their data repositories in these remote offices, they are finding that it is not a requirement that they replicate all of the data at these sites to a central site. Further, managing what data is replicated and when it is replicated often becomes the responsibility of someone in the main office. This calls for the solution to include policies that can perform these tasks.

Addressing these specific user concerns is what FDS 2.0 is designed to do. To increase the availability and scalability of FDS, FalconStor took a two-pronged approach.

First, FalconStor increased the replication fan-in ratio of FDS from 32:1 to 150:1. This was done to meet the requirements of some of its customers that had over 100 remote and branch offices and wanted to replicate that data back to a central site.

These same customers also wanted high availability for the FalconStor FDS solution deployed at their central site to ensure replication and recovery at the remote sites could occur without interruption. To accommodate that requirement, an FDS appliance can now be configured with two highly available controller nodes.

This new high-availability feature on FDS 2.0 also has another application: ensuring that the backup windows of large capacity, highly available database applications are met. One of the problems of using disk-based backups for these applications is that if the backup appliance fails, so does the application's backup. By using this new high availability feature, organizations can mitigate the possibility of these backup failures occurring.

Backup software defaults may need to be increased to account for the failover time of the FDS appliance or the backup jobs put into a queue so they can restart and pick up where they left off after a failover. In either case, the possibility for backup job failures is minimized while negating the need for someone to come onsite or login and restart the backup job remotely.

The other major improvement that FDS 2.0 brings forward is improved management of the backup data. FDS 2.0 now integrates with the Symantec NetBackup OpenStorage API (OST) protocol so organizations with NetBackup can use it to control and manage replication of data, even down to what backup jobs are replicated between sites.

Those sites that do not have NetBackup can still take advantage of these more granular policy management features for data movement and replication using FDS. FDS includes its own central management console so these policies can be setup and administered for all FDS appliances under its management. In so doing, FDS 2.0 empowers administrators to specify which files and folders that they want to replicate which contributes to minimizing the bandwidth and storage capacity consumed while enabling centralized management of backup data.

All size organizations are moving towards disk based backup but, as they do so, are finding deduplication and replication are alone not enough to ensure a seamless transition from tape to disk. This is leading to disk-based backup product moving to 2.0 offerings that add higher fan-in ratios, higher availability and improved management capabilities such as what the new FalconStor FDS 2.0 offers. In the process, it addresses new user requirements for making the implementation and management of disk-based backup a more automated process to successfully execute upon.

Three Tips for Making the Right Choice between CDP and Deduplication

2010-01-04T11:00:00Z

Deduplication is now widely recognized as a prerequisite technology for next generation data protection. While this is a correct view, to classify it as the only new technology that organizations need to consider in order to successfully redesign their backup infrastructure does not paint a complete picture. More specifically, the recent and rapid maturation of continuous data protection (CDP) has put organizations in a position where they need some criteria to make an informed decision as to how to proceed with these two technologies.

Articles and blogs that cover CDP and deduplication sometimes tend to put these two technologies in competition with one another. While there is some truth in this allegation since they are often both chasing the same funds budgeted for data protection, CDP and deduplication attempt to solve the same problem (backup and recovery) within organizations with very different results. So for organizations trying to decide between CDP and deduplication, here are three tips that can give you some insight as to how to best proceed:

1. Establish what level of change your organization is comfortable making. This may seem like an odd statement to make but CDP opens up many more new possibilities for backup, disaster recovery (DR) and testing and development than what deduplication offers.

Deduplication is designed to work in conjunction with existing backup software and reduce backup data stores. It can be deployed with minimal disruption to your current backup environment while still improving backup success rates and backup and recovery times.

CDP will do this as well but its long term impact on an organization is more dramatic. It will force an organization to re-think and ultimately change the way it does backups and recoveries. CDP can initially run side-by-side with existing backup software but its end game is a change-over in its backup process to CDP as the first line of data protection. This is a shift your organization may or may not be prepared to make.

2. Know the scope of your authority and influence. In my previous job as a storage administrator, I had a great deal of control over the storage solutions I selected. However the decision as what data protection software was used to protect applications was often still left to the many application owners that I supported.

In my case, it was easier and less disruptive to introduce a target-based deduplication solution such as the FalconStor VTL since the application owners could use it with whatever backup software they were already using. While a CDP solution like the FalconStor Continuous Data Protector was certainly a viable option, it required more buy-in on their part.

However it is no secret that more organizations are looking to centralize their data protection solutions so they can gain more value from their copies of their protected data while merging backup and recovery with disaster recovery. To do so, they have to give more authority to those put in positions of responsibility so they can deliver on these new requirements.

Those in this new position will likely find that CDP is a better fit to deliver on these objectives than deduplication because of the number of new application recovery and data management possibilities it delivers.

3. Be clear as what your organization's top priority is in regards to data protection. Having this priority clearly stated and agreed upon as soon as possible will save you a lot of anguish and help you make the right choice between CDP and deduplication for your organization.

For instance, if your organization's primary concern is improving its current backup situation while improving and automating its local and offsite DR solution is still low on the backburner then it only logical to bring in a deduplication solution like the FalconStor VTL or FDS. However if your organization is ready to tackle the broader issue of DR and wants a solution that can deliver 10 to 30 minute application recoveries locally or remotely then a solution like the FalconStor Continuous Data Protector should be given a higher priority.

As organizations look to redesign their backup infrastructures, many will be confronted with a decision between CDP and deduplication. However the choice between these two technologies should not be viewed as a decision between "right and wrong" or "better and worse" but rather, "Which is the right one for me?" These are now both mature technologies with plenty of documented customer success stories to support the justification for their deployments.

To make the right decision, an organization (or those individuals within an organization responsible for its data protection and DR strategies) needs to know its culture, what its highest priorities are in regards to data protection and DR and how much authority those responsible for executing on the decision will have to carry it out. Once this information is known and agreed upon, it becomes fairly straightforward for the organization to decide whether CDP or deduplication is the best fit for it and the challenges it is trying to resolve.

More Organizations Put Application and Disaster Recoveries on Fast Track Using CDP

2009-11-18T11:00:00Z

It is no longer a question of if organizations are going to use disk as a backup target but a matter of what form of disk-based backup are they going to use. File servers (NAS) and virtual tape libraries (VTLs) are two common forms of disk-based solutions that organizations deploy but these approaches fail to take full advantage of the robust recovery capabilities that disk can provide. It is for this reason that more organizations are leveraging continuous data protection (CDP) to fast track their application recoveries.

CDP incorporates disk into the overall backup and recovery in a method that differs from either VTLs or NAS. Rather than simply serving as a target for backup software, CDP takes more full advantage of disk's benefits. CDP:

Initially takes a full copy of the production data
Continuously captures or tracks data modifications to the production data
Stores these changes independent of the production data

But the key differentiator of CDP is that CDP gives organizations the flexibility to immediately recover applications without first requiring the backup software to recover the application data. This is possible because CDP keeps a copy of the production data in a state that is recognizable to the application unlike backup software which stores data in a format that requires the backup software to recover it. Further, CDP enables organizations to recover data to any previous point-in-time, even as short as a few seconds prior to when the application fails or data corruption occurs.

It is for these reasons that more organizations are selecting CDP as their preferred way to implement disk in their environment. Consider the following real life examples.

The Township (the Township of Scugog is approximately 65 kms northeast of Toronto, Ontario, Canada) of Scugog's infrastructure lead, Shawn Mears, was doing once-a-day backups of the Oracle database that contained the Township's financial application data. This approach left its financial data exposed for up to 24 hours and forced him to rely on recoveries that could takes hours, even days, to complete.

As he looked to redesign the Township's backup infrastructure, rather than just settling for faster backups or recoveries using VTLs or NAS, he opted for near-instantaneous recoveries using the FalconStor Continuous Data Protector solution. Now he can do near-real time recoveries of his Oracale database and says, "The FalconStor solution did everything that we hoped it would and it was a pretty painless procedure to implement."

Strand Associates, an engineering firm based in Madison, WI, had individual tape backups in each of its 11 offices across the United States that were handled by an engineer or secretary in each office. This situation was untenable in the mind of Justin Bell, Strand's network administrator. Backup jobs were failing, tapes were being misplaced or lost and central IT was chasing its tail trying to troubleshoot problems in this distributed environment.

Bell came to the realization that he had to do more than just improve his backup and recovery situation across these different locations, he had to recover data as quickly as possible without burdening the IT staff in the central IT office or individuals at the remote offices.

He too deployed the FalconStor Continuous Data Protector at all of these remote offices which completely changed his company's view of recovery. The company used to do up to 800 restore jobs annually with each jobs taking hours to complete. Now he says, "Using FalconStor Continuous Data Protector, it takes just minutes to perform one restore."

Organizations are rightfully looking to adopt disk-based backup solutions as part of their backup redesigns. But these organizations recognized they can do much more with disk than just deploy it as a backup target. They figured out that a CDP solution such as the FalconStor Continuous Data Protector does much more than just increase backup success rates or shorten backup windows; it provides them with the assurance that backup now works while putting them on a fast track to local application recoveries and remote disaster recoveries.

Oracle Leverages FalconStor to Complement Oracle VM's Native Data Protection Strategy

2009-10-21T13:35:00Z

"Own the complete technology stack and you own the world." If you follow Oracle at all, you know (or at least strongly suspect) that this philosophy of complete technology domination pervades its thinking.

Whether these allegations about Oracle are true or not are another story but they make for good conversation, especially when one looks at Oracle VM. After all, Oracle owns the applications, provides a great backend database for those applications, and gives away a virtualized environment to run them on. But is Oracle, with the addition of Oracle VM, ready to own the virtual enterprise data center from top to bottom?

Our initial reaction after reading though some of the Oracle documentation set for Oracle VM is, "No, it is not, at least as a standalone solution." This is based on the fact that there are definite holes in Oracle VM's ability to provide data protection and high availability for the enterprise.

Oracle VM's native high availability features only allow for the failover of a virtual server by configuring a shared storage pool beneath multiple virtual servers. The problem here is that while it works for server failovers, its high availability only enables data mobility at the server level and does not account for any data corruption or data loss. In essence, storage virtualization is non-existent for a virtualized server environment. No data protection, no support for replication or snapshots - not even support for crash consistent or non-quiesced snapshots.

But no more!

Just recently, Oracle called upon FalconStor to provide data protection for the Oracle VM platform. By integrating FalconStor's storage virtualization and data replication solutions for virtual servers, Oracle VM can now bring a high level of data protection, recoverability, and continuous availability and work within customer's environments regardless of the underlying storage infrastructure. Specifically, FalconStor recently announced Oracle VM solutions that integrate seamlessly with Oracle VM on two levels:

FalconStor Application Snapshot Director. The FalconStor Application Snapshot Director sits directly on and has been integrated with the Oracle VM hypervisor. FalconStor Application Snapshot Director communicates with FalconStor's NSS or CDP resources and with the application snapshot agents on the individual Oracle VMs that coordinates snapshot efforts between multiple machines while maintaining the consistency of the whole stack. These agents quiesce the O/S and application and prompts the virtual machine that could still have writes residing in its memory to commit those writes to disk.

FalconStor Application Snapshot Director provides full visibility into the virtualized environment so it can take a consistent snapshot of this collection of virtual machines and deliver a full breadth of snapshot and replication capabilities. Used in this capacity, companies can take snapshots and recover individual Oracle VMs without going through typical crash recovery modes to correct any non-written or non-committed writes on that LUN.

Integration with Oracle's Secure Backup. HyperTrac is a utility that FalconStor provides to its clients to coordinate backups operations between VMware vCenter Server, the FalconStor NSS and backup software. In this update, HyperTrac integrates with Oracle Secure Backup, communicates with the Oracle VM and integrates with Oracle Secure Backup to automate the scheduling of the taking of snapshots and then mount the snapshots onto the backup server where the backup is completed.

Once mounted on the Oracle Secure Backup server, it can do file level backups of that virtual machine to any disk target and then deduplicate the data. The primary benefit this provides is that now all backup processes are completely offloaded from the production environment with zero impact to backup and recovery.

Many companies have a desire to standardize on one technology stack from top to bottom, and Oracle is certainly making its case that it is looking to deliver just such a configuration. But such holistic solutions tend to have a few holes in them that can only be solved by third party products.

Oracle is no different as the native data protection offerings for Oracle VM are still a challenge. The good news is that Oracle and FalconStor have effectively collaborated to address this challenge in Oracle VM environments. By FalconStor integrating and adapting its virtualization and data protection technology with Oracle VM, organizations can put in place a more comprehensive data protection solution for Oracle environments that supports the virtualized top-to-bottom technology stack that they are looking to build.

FalconStor Transcends both Physical and Virtual Boundaries with new VMware Initiative

2009-08-31T10:00:00Z

VMware ESX Server and its latest vSphere software release have become instrumental in helping organizations tame server hardware costs within data centers while improving the ROI associated with existing and new projects. But this isn't to say that virtualization doesn't come with any pain points--and managing virtual storage infrastructures is one of the biggest. So to help combat these challenges, FalconStor Software today announced at VMworld 2009 a comprehensive VMware Initiative that will help organizations bridge their physical and virtual infrastructures and provide continuous availability in multi-vendor storage environments.

Many of the emerging pain points within virtual storage infrastructure concern the enablement of high availability in VMware environments. Despite VMware's virtualization capabilities, many of VMware's high availability features depend on a highly available storage infrastructure that VMware does not directly address.

Backup pains are exasperated in growing virtual environments as physical and virtual server infrastructures often demand different backup techniques. As a result, they are managed separately with little commonality in their data protection or disaster recovery approaches.

However this is not a long-term strategy as standardized, common interface to the storage infrastructure is becoming a necessity in order to effectively deploy server virtualization. Further, these standardized interfaces need to encompass remote and branch offices (ROBOs) as well as small and medium businesses (SMBs), as they are the ones that can least afford to make significant storage investments.

In light of these emerging enterprise, ROBO and SMB requirements, FalconStor today introduced a new VMware Initiative that focuses in on four areas.

Continuous Availability. FalconStor extends VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager services to the physical server infrastructure and provides automated failover and failback support for these physical servers whether they are located locally or remotely.

One of the greatest costs for disaster recovery at remote sites has to do with the build-out of an infrastructure that meets the same specs as an organization's critical but more costly primary site.

Having parallel environments quickly becomes cost prohibitive especially when an organization considers that its DR services is something it does not use very often. It is basically a stand-by environment and provides fail-over when required only for a very short period of time until the main infrastructure is brought back up and running.

FalconStor's virtualization platform helps take care of some of these biggest challenges when organizations implement vCenter Site Recovery Manager. It eliminates the need for organizations to deploy the same storage infrastructure at both the production and recovery sites while also removing storage system vendor lock-in.

This is noteworthy since vCenter Site Recovery Manager support is limited to a relatively small number of disk vendors. Using FalconStor, organizations can use whatever storage they have available, locally or remotely. In so doing, it brings the management of these disparate storage infrastructures for physical and virtual environments under one umbrella.

The other vCenter Site Recovery Manager drawback that FalconStor addresses with this release is the difficulty in failing back after a failover. Currently, organizations have to redefine replication methods from their DR site back to the production site, create all of those protection groups at the remote site, institute recovery plans at the production site, fail over from the remote site to production, and then repeat the same steps from the production site to the remote site to protect the production site again by Site Recovery Manager.

Not only can this be very expensive in terms of resources and time in order to do it an Site Recovery Manager failback properly, it is prone to human error. To simplify this, FalconStor now provides a plug-in to vCenter that will scan vCenter and the storage server on the protected site that will discover the virtual machine, data store and storage replication configuration details. Once this is done, SRM is set up to provide automated failover and failback and even migrate the recovery plan to the remote site. Most impressively, this can all be managed and accomplished completely within Site Recovery Manager.

Virtual Storage Management. FalconStor's new plug-in to the vCenter console was simply a stroke of genius as it enables vCenter to manage the server and the storage infrastructure from one console. Using vCenter, organizations can manage any FalconStor Networked Storage Server (NSS) infrastructure so they do not have to go to the NSS console to do routine storage tasks such as provisioning LUNs. This should further expedite virtual server deployments and improve their protection since the plug-in completely automates the whole set up process.

Virtual Appliance Solutions. One of the other slick moves that FalconStor has made is porting all of its solutions to virtual appliances to offer a cost-effective data services model to ROBOs and SMBs.

Lately FalconStor has ported its File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) to the VMware environment in the form of a virtual appliance without requiring organizations to add networked storage to their infrastructure. This option becomes very attractive to ROBOs and SMBs as they can now introduce deduplication into their environment on their existing physical VMware ESX Server with no changes to their physical environment.

New Direct Storage Access. This new feature provides FalconStor Virtual Appliances a direct path to the network or storage card and completely bypasses the storage virtualization layer created by the hypervisor.

The FalconStor I/O device driver directly accesses the fiber channel card or 10GB Ethernet card sitting in that virtual machine which should result in higher performance connectivity for storage services. In its internal testing, FalconStor has seen a 10-fold increase in performance and can nearly maximize the I/O throughput on an ESX server that has two NICs assuming the attached storage device can support these high rates of I/O.

VMware plays an increasingly critical role as to how organizations are cutting their data center operational costs while improving application availability and recoverability; but VMware can't do it all. This new VMware initiative from FalconStor does an admirable job of filling in some of the holes that VMware leaves behind while taking advantage of the virtual infrastructure that VMware has created in the process. In so doing, FalconStor provides organizations a clear path for resolving their storage and data protection issues locally and remotely regardless if they are using physical or virtual servers and in such a way that it does not take a rocket scientist to implement and support.

A Better Archive and Backup Deduplication Fit for VAR Solution Portfolios

2009-08-06T10:00:00Z

Most VARs who have had success selling Data Domain systems over the last couple of years are feeling a bit uncomfortable right now: EMC has announced its official take-over of Data Domain. VARs have made a good living on Data Domain, contributing to Data Domain's success as having one of the best-selling, fastest-growing deduplication storage systems in the market. VARs are now feeling vulnerable to EMC's goodwill - or probable lack thereof.

EMC's goodwill is a commodity that is traditionally in short supply when it comes to its channel partners. As a result, more VARs believe they need an alternative solution to offer. Long perceived as a 'me-too' vendor in the backup deduplication space, FalconStor appears to be in the right place with its technology at the right time to capitalize on the gap in the channel market that EMC's recent acquisition of Data Domain creates.

First, some background on the current situation with EMC and Data Domain: EMC announced on Monday, July 20, that it has effective control of over 80% of Data Domain stock. So with EMC now officially taking control of Data Domain, EMC started talking publicly last week about what it intends to do with Data Domain. Its press release, press briefings, and blogs are full of their plans for Frank Slootman and team. Frank and Joe Tucci also published an open letter to customers and partners, which doesn't say much but "stay tuned as we progress." But anyone who reads these materials closely will note that one topic is notably missing: EMC's intentions for Data Domain's VARs.

So if previous history is any indicator, the likely outcome of this acquisition is that EMC will begin to escort Data Domain into their large enterprise accounts. The joint FAQ seems to indicate that this will happen. Meantime, VARs are on their own to decide what they will offer for a backup and archive deduplication solution for their clients.

Now, some details on why FalconStor might actually turn out to be an even BETTER fit for VAR solution portfolios than Data Domain: FalconStor has seen the light that Data Domain shone into the industry, and is packaging its software deduplication technology into standard product configurations that are simpler and easier to deploy - because it comes prepackaged for servers and storage.

The FalconStor TOTALLY Open software offers more features and better scalability than Data Domain, but has been too hard to purchase and deploy as compared to the Data Domain appliance approach. By combining FalconStor software with select hardware platforms - hopefully those which the VARs find most attractive to offer - FalconStor should be able to offer the best of all worlds.

Certainly, FalconStor's recent announced partnership with immixGroup to add its TOTALLY Open solutions to the partner's GSA schedule should encourage VARs selling to federal agencies, and to state and local government. The solutions added include FalconStor VTL with deduplication, CDP, and more.

Although packaged for hardware, FalconStor still offers customers the ability to purchase the servers and storage of their choice. This choice means that VARs need never again be vulnerable to the fate of a single storage vendor solution. FalconStor also works with virtually any backup or archive software, enabling VARs to position and sell any data management software with virtually any storage device in their portfolio. For VARs, this approach offers the ultimate mix and match of components from their portfolios, with at least the promise of better opportunities to maximize profit. VARs are also key to FalconStor's strategy of simplification for their customers, as only the VARs can make the combination of the hardware and software appear truly seamless for their customers.

A New Benchmark for Backup Performance: Total Time to DR

2009-06-01T13:00:00Z

Determining backup performance has consistently been extremely difficult for customers to rationalize, seeing as there is no real meter or benchmark to look at. Just take a second and think of all the moving parts inside your backup and recovery environment (media servers, clients, databases, email, network, SAN, disk, tape, offsite vaults) - you name it, there is a laundry list of things to look at when trying to determine accurate performance metrics.

In most cases vendors will typically take the absolute best-case scenario to provide performance metrics and, as anyone knows that has spent any sort of time managing a backup infrastructure, those numbers are usually just a metric that sound impressive but are never realized in most production environments because there are too many variables one has to optimize to even achieve them.

However, FalconStor has announced something extremely unique. It has taken a scenario that is more likely to be encountered in most production environments, tested that and come up with some very attractive performance numbers for its VTL product when used in 4 Gb FC storage environment in conjunction with Veritas NetBackup's OST API. It's interesting and refreshing to see a vendor provide performance metrics based on common denominators that are more likely to be found in customer environments and ensure that if a customer does decide to deploy its VTL, the bar for performance is more likely to go up than down.

The overall metric FalconStor was going after was Total Time to DR (Disaster Recovery), which is the time it takes to backup the data, deduplicate the data, replicate the data to a remote DR site, and then finally recover the data so it is in an operational state. This metric is all encompassing, as it takes every aspect of the backup and recovery environment into account when performing a true DR.

As most of you know, most backup metrics are based on just one variable: backup ingest performance. However, this is only one small piece of the overall puzzle. Recovery and replication are the much more important ones. It's great to backup data really fast, but if it takes three times as long to recover it, well, try to explain that to your CIO when a major application goes out and he is standing over your shoulder waiting for the data to be recovered.

One other key metric FalconStor tracked was the Total Time to Protect Data, which includes:

Backing up the data
Deduplicating the data, and
Replicating the data to the remote DR site

The configuration FalconStor choose to use was standard Dell Servers with standard Storage (SATA Drives) in a Fibre Channel (FC) environment. Using the latest FalconStor VTL software in combination with the OST API from Symantec, it garnered some very good results which are detailed below:

The test bed consisted of:

100 TBs of production data
Single cluster of two FalconSotr VTL nodes
Four deduplication nodes
Backup and deduplication processes were run concurrently

In this configuration, the total time to backup and deduplicate the 100 TBs of data was under 14 hours which is an average of about 2 GB/sec. When reconfigured to just minimize total backup time, the two-node VTL cluster achieved 2.8 GBs/second of backup speed which reduced the total backup window to under 10 hours for the same amount of data.

Above and beyond the standard configuration of this test, there are more options that exist that not only enhance these performance metrics but also provide more all-inclusive protection of your data, some of which include:

High speed tape duplication. This leverages the NDMP and OST protocols integration to initiate high performance tape exports to physical tape library directly from the VTL while maintaining full catalog consistency of the backup catalog.
Host Backup Software on the VTL. This provides the ability to install 3^rd party backup software directly onto the FalconStor VTL system so organizations can ,move backup traffic off the SAN and onto the VTL's server bus to increase backup performance
Backup Catalog Replication. Using Falconstor's NSS functionality, which is built directly into all the FalconStor software packages, a customer can maintain the ability to replicate the backup catalog itself and then in turn recover it at the DR site. Organizations can then recover all components of the backup and recovery environment with minimal effort.
Platform Flexibility. FalconStor VTL software is available as a custom-built appliance, your own servers, or even thru a virtual machine. This offers numerous options when working with any size location or backup data-set.

This set of performance numbers from FalconStor is based a more relevant, real-world scenario than many I have seen. These help to ensure that when you decide to deploy a VTL solution, there are some actual benchmarks that are both meaningful and achievable. FalconStor offers a number of flexible options for its VTL so it can be architected to meet the needs of your environment as opposed to requiring a complete re-architecture of your backup environment. Yet what was missing until now - and what these performance numbers now provide - is a great starting point for customers from which to work regardless of which FalconStor VTL configuration they select so they can understand the real impact a FalconStor VTL will have on their environment.

Enterprise Shops Still Opting for VTLs as their Preferred Deduplication Target

2009-05-26T10:00:00Z

Deduplication has emerged as "the" quick fix for the myriad of problems associated with enterprise backups. Deduplication enables organizations to shrink backup windows, minimize their reliance on tape, and more easily and cost effectively replicate their backup data to an offsite location. But as deduplication has grown in popularity, so has the number of ways that organizations can chose to implement it in their environment.

There are now so many choices that when it comes to selecting the right deduplication option for your environment, the task can become quite daunting with the ramifications of making a wrong decision potentially very unpleasant in this current economic environment.
The major deduplication choices that enterprise organizations have to decide among include:

Disk-based VTLs. These are disk devices that emulate of tape and deduplicate data either inline (while the backup is occurring) or post process (after the backup completes).
Disk-based Backups. Similar to a VTL, the disk device appears as a file server to the backup software and creates a pool of disk that again deduplicates data either inline or post process.
Backup Software Deployments. Implemented in this form deduplication occurs on the host backup server where the backup software application resides. As the backup data passes through the backup software, it is deduplicated.
Client Side Deployments. This is the other major form in which deduplication is now available. Implemented this way, the host backup software agent deduplicates the data before it leaves the host.

The tough question that enterprise organizations need to answer however is, "Which of these deduplication techniques is the right approach for us?" The right answer for each enterprise organization will depend upon a number of variables but the feedback that DCIG consistently receives from enterprise shops is that they still plan to continue to adopt and grow their implementation of disk-based VTL's, but not for some of the reasons they think.

There is a lot of "market-techiture" put out on the fact that VTLs require significantly overhead and time to deploy and maintain. While this may have been true in the past, many of the mundane tasks associated with VTL management have either been automated or are now built into the VTL products. Further, the main reasons that enterprise shops are still opting to stick with or bring new VTLs into their environment include:

Can support multiple backup software products at the same time. This does not require organizations to swap out their existing backup software or standardize on one.
No centralized IT infrastructure. Enterprise organizations want to centralize that backup data stores but have distributed IT departments. Using one central VTL enables all of them to store their backup data to one central repository while still maintaining their autonomy.
Ease of implementation. Since VTLs look just like physical tape libraries to the backup software, there is minimal or no need to change anything in the infrastructure from an operational perspective while solving many of the backup problems that organizations are experiencing.

Of course, even when enterprises arrive at the conclusion that they want to proceed with the use of VTLs in their environment, they still need to make a decision about what enterprise VTL to use in their environment. In that regards, FalconStor is one of the early enterprise VTL players with a number of the big-iron vendors OEMing and/or re-badging FalconStor's VTL software as their own.

The arguments for using FalconStor VTL in an enterprise role are numerous. It can scale the performance and capacity features of its VTL independently. Deduplication is performed in a post-process fashion so there is minimal or no impact to normal backup routines or backup windows initially or longer term. It can scale the CPU behind its post-process deduplication algorithm independently so as backup volumes increase, data can still be deduplicated in a timely manner. Finally, organizations can put whatever storage platforms behind the VTL that they like to store the backup data plus FalconStor provides a seamless integration of its VTL with its replication and file system products so enterprises can grow in these directions as internal needs dictate.

Even through deduplication may be a "quick fix" to enterprise backup problems, enterprise organizations should avoid the temptation to make an uninformed quick decision about their selection of a deduplication solution. Aside from the multiple ways to deduplicate backup data, enterprises also need to factor in how they are organizationally structured as well as which solution has the street credentials, back-end expertise and vision to support their environment and grow with them. In this respect, FalconStor delivers deduplication in the form that many enterprise shops want it (a VTL), offers the capabilities and support that they seek and provides a road map and platform that not only meets an organization's needs Day One but can be grown and adapted as an organization's backup infrastructure evolves.

Disk-based Backup does not Magically Break the Corporate LAN Bottleneck

2009-04-23T10:00:00Z

It's easy for organizations to believe that disk will solve their backup problems. But some organizations are starting to discover that while disk solved some of their backup problems, they are still not realizing the full reductions in backup times and improved performance rates on their application servers that they may have initially expected. If an organization finds itself in this predicament, then it probably behooves them to take a closer look at their backup architecture and determine exactly how much backup traffic is going across their corporate LAN.

The problem that can potentially emerge in a disk-based backup architecture is the corporate LAN can become a bottleneck when a backup server is directly attached to a virtual tape library (VTL). As backup data is sent by the backup agent on the application server to the VTL attached to the backup server, the data is piped through the application server, sent over a 1 Gb LAN connection and then funneled through the backup server to which the VTL is attached. So while the backup to the VTL attached to the backup server may complete successfully, going through all of these touch points can slow down the backup and introduce overhead on both the application and backup servers.

To address this situation, FalconStor recently announced its VTL Backup Accelerator that gives organizations a mechanism to address all three of these potential bottlenecks without requiring organizations to virtualize their storage infrastructure. The VTL Backup Accelerator works in the following way:

A light weight, low impact Backup Accelerator agent is installed on the application server. The Backup Accelerator agent can first complement and then replace the normal backup software agent on the server as it protects the data on the server.
A FalconStor Backup Accelerator appliance is installed on the corporate LAN. This appliance presents itself as an iSCSI target to the application server that has the Backup Accelerator agent installed on it. The Backup Accelerator agent on the application server discovers the iSCSI target, makes an initial copy of the application's server data to the Backup Accelerator appliance and then copies all writes on the application server going forward to the Backup Accelerator.
A daily snapshot is created on the Backup Accelerator appliance. On a daily basis at a designated time or times, the Backup Accelerator agent will create application consistent snapshots on the Backup Accelerator appliance. This snapshot can then be presented to the backup server which can use it as the source for a backup at any time.

The attraction of this approach is two-fold. First, it eliminates the daily overhead that normally occurs on the application server when a backup takes place. While the copied writes do incur some overhead (FalconStor estimates that the performance overhead on the server is approximately 1 - 2%), many organizations will find this amount of overhead acceptable in light of the performance hit that backup jobs normally incur on the application server. Second, because a snapshot exists on the Backup Accelerator appliance, the backup server can grab this snapshot at any time and perform the backup. This eliminates the backup window which remains a concern among many organizations when it comes to backups.

Backup to disk clearly solves many of the issues that organizations have with backup but they should not naively assume it solves all of them or that backup to disk overcomes the laws of physics - it does not. Introducing disk as a backup target and then running backups over the LAN may solve some but not all of the backup problems that organizations experience.

By taking snapshots and moving LAN-based backups to a VTL SAN infrastructure using FalconStor's VTL Backup Accelerator, organizations can simultaneously move the processing associated with backups off of the application server while significantly accelerating backup time by moving the backup traffic to the FC SAN (4 or 8 Gb FC links). In so doing, organizations can realize the full benefits of disk-based backup for their LAN-attached servers without some of its hidden side effects that exist now.

Using Virtualization to Anticipate and Solve Today's and Tomorrow's VMware Virtual Machine Backup Problems

2009-04-01T10:00:00Z

To understand a specific company's technology, sometimes you have to do more than just understand the company behind the product, you have to understand the philosophy of the company behind the product. That was probably what impressed me the most when I recently had a briefing with Fadi Albatal, FalconStor's Director of Product Marketing. Yes, we went over FalconStor's new HyperTrac Backup Accelerator for VMware feature, but what really piqued my interest was how HyperTrac fits into FalconStor's overall data protection methodology and why FalconStor's customers can anticipate further innovations like this in the future.

First off, what HyperTrac does and why it matters. As everyone is aware, backing up VMware virtual machines is a pain in the backside. Putting backup agents on every virtual machine is time consuming and a difficult process to manage. Scheduling backup jobs so they do not conflict requires the skills of Houdini. Then, even if you do all of that perfectly, there is always the possibility that the backup job taps too many server or network resources and negatively impacts other production jobs running on virtual machines on that host ESX server.

VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) solves some of these problems by taking a snapshot of images of specific virtual machines on that ESX server. Using VCB, companies can create hot backups of virtual machine on this physical ESX server. It may negate the need to install and configure a backup agent within the virtual machine and it alleviates the impact of backup on other virtual machines running on that ESX server.

But VCB creates a new problem - the VMware ESX host needs to maintain snapshots during the backup process and commit changes that occurred during the backup to the virtual machine after the backup of the snapshot is complete. This may not sound like a big deal, but my sources tell me that VMware still does a lousy job of managing its VCB snapshots as it still is in its 1.x release. One VMware guru even told me that, unless the previous VCB snapshot is deleted before the new VCB snapshot is created, the entire VCB snapshot process can fail -- though I have not been able to confirm this.

It is these types of issues that FalconStor HyperTrac Backup Accelerator for VCB addresses. It installs on any server with VCB and creates a standby virtual machine on a separate VMware ESX host dedicated to backup processes. HyperTrac then uses FalconStor thin snapshots to present VMware snapshots as the source data for VCB backup processes.

Now a savvy IT administrator may say, "Aha! I thought I might have to virtualize my storage infrastructure to realize these benefits." But this goes back to the story behind the story that I mentioned at the outset of this blog as to why organizations need to understand the philosophy and foundation on which FalconStor's IPStor software was built.

The executive team at FalconStor originally came from Cheyenne Software which was the originator of the ARCserve backup software. After Cheyenne Software was sold to CA back in 1996, the executive team did not abandon the concept of data protection but recognized that a new paradigm was starting even then to take shape in enterprise data centers.

Specifically organizations were creating vast amounts of data in distributed environments. To efficiently manage and protect all of that data, organizations would eventually need to virtualize their storage infrastructure so the FalconStor's IPStor software platform was born. Upon this advanced data services platform, FalconStor builds storage management and data protection solutions that address the different challenges of data protection and recovery. And that would include FalconStor NSS, the storage management and virtualization solution that features HyperTrac.

FalconStor recognized even then that virtualization was going to sweep the data center for a number of reasons. It afforded better utilization of existing resources (network, server, and storage); it created a consistent image of the data; it offered a consistent way to manage the data; and, virtualization affords a means to offer the advanced data protection features that using virtualized disk could offer. This leads us right back to why it is fairly straightforward for FalconStor and its users to introduce new features like HyperTrac into its virtualized infrastructure.

FalconStor's new HyperTrac Backup Accelerator for VMware was the focus of a recent press release. However the real story here is that companies serious about redesigning their backup infrastructure need to think about broader issues than just tactical issues like completing their backups more quickly. Instead they need to put in a foundation that allows them to quickly and efficiently introduce solutions to whatever problems emerge without requiring them to re-architect their entire infrastructure. Because FalconStor NSS virtualizes the entire storage infrastructure, it puts companies in a position to accomplish that exact objective.