Falconstor Community

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.

As I’ve mentioned before in previous blogs, the way I think about things changed after business school.  Life was far simpler as an engineer.  I enjoyed and appreciated products for their technology with no consideration for financial implications.  I see an analogy between my current car situation and many of the customers I speak with on a regular basis, with regard to SANs.  Should you buy a new SAN or enhance and maintain your existing, paid for, SAN?

Looking for a DR solution for you VMware environments? I can comfortably say that VMware has developed one of the best DR automation tools I’ve ever seen. It’s intuitive, comprehensive, and allows you to execute DR plans efficiently, and DR tests and rehearsals with no disruption to your production environment. vCenter Site Recovery Manager - we’ll use the abbreviation SRM for this post, not to be confused with Storage Resource Management – leverages the storage infrastructure to replicate data between the primary and DR sites. This integration allows for a full execution of DR processes and a seamless operational failover. In the labs you’ll learn how to set up you SRM environment, execute a DR test, trouble shoot and resolve issues that you may encounter. How to find them? Here they are: ALT3001, LAB11, and LAB12. You can also see the schedule at FalconStor @ VMworld 2010 website.

Welcome to virtual reality! Now that virtualization is real, it’s time for us to talk about the reality behind its application. We are all excited about how virtualization is changing the IT world – providing better resource utilization, cost reductions, faster provisioning, automation, higher availability, and better mobility. It all sounds good – no it actually sounds great – and the technology is completely transforming the way we design data centers and define business processes. Now that we’ve seen the benefits that server virtualization brought to the table, the next logical application is desktop virtualization. The concept is bringing a new approach to enterprise-wide desktop deployments that is aimed at providing a better end-user and administrator experience than physical desktops: lowering the cost of acquisition and management while offering a highly scalable, easy to deploy, and fully protected desktop environment. Nevertheless, this consolidation raises new challenges in terms of compute resource allocation and granular data protection and recovery processes – this is where virtual reality starts.

This week we announced a new FalconStor customer, Austin Powder of Texas, which has been helping companies around the world to blow stuff up since 1833.It has plants in three states and in Mexico as well as 65 stores in the U.S. and Canada, but Austin Powder's IT staff isn't large.The company relies on 10 IT professionals to support 1,000 users.That staff had big plans for virtualization and data protection, but it didn't have a big budget or a big appetite for replacing existing IT investments.Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that Austin Powder looked at nearly a dozen vendors pushing proprietary virtualization and data protection solutions and lit a fuse under them.

Kaboom.

The need for speed has been and will always be the most relevant driver for new technology development – faster cars, faster airplanes, faster trains, and obviously faster computers. But why? Well the answer is simple.