FalconStor’s storage virtualization technology is a critical component of our efforts to transform the data center.  The results of this transformation include optimized storage efficiency, consolidation of heterogeneous storage systems, native business continuity, and business application resilience via automated disaster recovery.  While these individual features are known to most in the IT industry, it’s rare to find them all in one platform. 

In a leading government institution in Berlin, FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) is providing flexible storage virtualization and a full array of sophisticated data protection services for the virtualized pool of storage. That deployment – which ensures high availability with a fully redundant and fault-tolerant storage infrastructure – just earned FalconStor an HP AllianceONE Partner of the Year Award in the category of Converged Infrastructure Solutions for Government.

When VMware took a look at how virtual shops were approaching data protection back in 2008, the responses from data centers indicated that, for all the benefits of virtualization, the shift away from physical machines was coming with some significant growing pains.  Eighty percent of respondents to the survey said they were backing up to tape and failing to meet their backup windows.  The traditional back-up challenges they faced before going virtual were magnified in their new environments, and they faced shrinking CPU, I/O and networking resources.

And over the past two years, companies have hunted for a solution that would deliver on the promise of virtualization and meet internal expectations for always-available, easily accessible data.  Most of those attempts were variations on traditional back-up methods with virtualized Band-Aids on top.

Today, we know that the key to success in protecting data in these environments does not lie in tweaking traditional backup methods to fit virtualized enterprises.  Rather, the foundation of the solution starts with storage.

During my conversations with people far smarter than me at SNW Fall in Dallas this week, the subject of the future of backup arose. The questions were: what exactly do you mean by the next generation of data protection and what do you mean when you say backup is broken?

Let me address the backup question first. If truth be told, we are performing this mission-critical task in much the same way we did when Cheyenne invented client/server backup. Our compute world has changed, but our approach to data protection has not kept pace. What I mean is that backup is broken due to three significant industry drivers:

1. Explosive data storage growth. The backup window is an endangered species, if not already extinct. Operations demand 24/7 availability and cannot tolerate outages due to backup traffic. This demand for always-available services coupled with the unprecedented growth in data has created a major challenge for all data protection professionals. 

2. Virtualization. Virtualization breaks backup for two main reasons. First, we are consolidating a lot of compute and storage power into a smaller number of servers, which stresses the available I/O. Second, virtualization introduces a new data format that challenges legacy backup solutions and at the same time presents a whole new world of data recovery opportunities.

3. Compressed operating budgets. It has been said that for every $1 spent on technology acquisition $8 are spent to manage it. There is constant pressure on IT to reduce this ratio.