FalconStor Reinvents Backup

FalconStor Software boasts solid success in the market for virtual tape libraries (VTLs), with high-profile OEM deals with the likes of EMC, IBM and Sun and 55 percent sales growth in its most recent quarter.

According to CEO ReiJane Huai, the company is just getting started.

In an interview with Enterprise Storage Forum today, Huai outlined the company’s vision as it moves from an intensive R&D phase into a more public marketing and sales phase, but he was quick to point out that the company’s focus will remain on development: about 75 percent of the company’s employees, or 240 people, are in product development roles.

It is that commitment to technological innovation that led EMC to sign on for five more years with FalconStor recently, inking a deal through 2013.

Huai sees the company at the forefront of a movement to incorporate a growing number of new technologies such as continuous data protection (CDP), virtual tape and de-duplicationinto standard backup products. FalconStor’s goal is to give storage users a single vendor for all that and more, he says.

“Backup architecture today needs an architectural fix,” Huai says.

Traditional tape backup fails 10 to 20 percent of the time, he says. By incorporating virtual tape technology, single-instance storage, snapshots with 100 percent reliability and CDP, FalconStor can lower the rate of backup failure without slowing down backups and all but eliminating backup windows, Huai claims. The company also pledges quick recovery times.

Huai took issue with a claim made earlier this week by Mendocino that the startup was the first to offer both CDP and near-CDP in a single offering. FalconStor’s CDP and snapshot offerings accomplish just that, he says.

Later this year, FalconStor plans to add multilingual indexing and search to its offerings, so users can, for example, search two to three years of online data to respond to a subpoena.

FalconStor also has the high-performance computing market in its sights, with a Fibre Channel and InfiniBand offering that can link data centers with HPC clusters for financial institutions, for example, using iSCSI over InfiniBand RDMA and replicating six Fibre Channel ports with a single low-cost InfiniBand port.

That offering about sums up FalconStor’s vision: a backup and recovery platform that spans protocols and geographic boundaries.

“We have a comprehensive solution to really address backup and recovery,” says Huai. “You have to be able to get it all from one vendor.”

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