Falconstor Community

I was at the annual VMware Partner Exchange event last week in Orlando.  FalconStor is a technology partner for VMware as well as Microsoft (Hyper-V) and Xen hypervisors.  The opening keynote was given by VMware CEO Paul Maritz.  One of the key points that I remember was his goal of driving global virtual server deployments “north of 50 percent.”  Of course, the preference is for those virtual servers to be of the VMware vSphere brand.  What does that mean if you have a mixed physical and virtual server environment, or if you have non-vSphere hypervisors?

Most storage vendors offer some type of volume copy functionality, either in-system or remote replication.  These copy functions are commonly promoted as business continuity (in-system copy) or disaster recovery ( remote replication).  Replication, or transporting data from one location to another, is analogous to household moving companies.  They transport your entire household, in many boxes, to your new house.  However, once all your household belongings are safely at your new home, you still have the complex and laborious task of unpacking and arranging things to make your new home functional.  Isn’t this effectively what remote data replication does?  Sure, all your data is safely at your remote data center, but now what?  Where's the 'Recovery' aspect of this paradigm?

Thin Provisioning is a fairly well known concept in the storage marketplace; provisioning a logical volume larger than the physical capacity actually accessible by the application or server (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_provisioning ).  Most storage array vendors offer thin provisioning on some or all their systems.  Many charge a premium for this feature as the gains in efficiency, CapEx and TCO are obvious.

However, for data protection purposes (mirrors, snapshots, and remote replica volumes) few give this technology consideration.  If your primary storage array does not have thin provisioning (or you did not pay for the feature), any underutilized capacity will be duplicated onto your data protection volumes.  This “duplication of waste” results in higher costs from a CapEx and OpEx perspective, resulting in questionable TCO of any data protection solution.

I’m often amazed by the things I learn talking to customers.  This technology space eventually comes down to money   –  making it, saving it or wasting it.  One example of this last aspect, wasting it, is something I learned about from talking to a customer recently.

FalconStor has been developing data protection solutions for many years.  We’ve also had remote replication capabilities for many years.  Some of you may be aware of the unique nature of FalconStor remote replication.  However, for anyone who is not I’d like to put some perspective into how, and why, FalconStor remote replication is the best in the industry. 

I saw this television commercial recently, by CarMax, called ‘Doors’; http://www.carmax.com/enus/why-carmax-commercials/default.html
So what’s the relation to data protection?  Most storage hardware, and even backup software, vendors offer many different functions, or types, of data protection; disk mirror volumes, point-in-time snapshots, remote replication, application-specific protection and management tools.  Each of these functions is considered a ‘product’ and sold accordingly. 

With 2011 around the corner and new budgets being built, IT is looking at how to effectively deal with the rising amount of data that needs to be effectively stored and in the event of a disaster, available for quickly recovery. In my earlier blog (http://tinyurl.com/2atf4h6), I examined the pressures faced by IT and provided two reasons why disk-based data protection is becoming immensely popular in the data center specifically around how it eliminates the backup window and how companies may still create tape backups using continuous data protection (CDP).

If you’re in charge of back-up and recovery at your organization, you likely have a lot on your mind these days.  Budget freezes.  New eDiscovery requirements.  Unabated year-over-year storage requirement growth.  And internal expectation for immediate return on investment.

Many IT vendors promise cost savings when you purchase their products, can these claims possibly be true; or just more BS?

It was on the last day of VMworld 2010 in San Francisco where it happened.  I was sitting at a Lab Station at the Moscone West building, learning a few things myself on vCloud Director.  Suddenly, one of the VMware Lab Staff member announced: "We have just reached a new milestone just moments ago, we have served our 145th THOUSAND (145K) virtual machine being deployed and destroyed)!  We all clapped our hands, we all enjoyed this moment of glory for the world of virtualization!

There were several labs available, and each lab required an average of 9 VM's to be deployed.  All in all, 15,300 complete labs were served out to attendees of the event, during those 4 days, at a rate of 4000 VM's per hour (created then destroyed).  The vCloud Director was a very popular lab, being a new product focused on the ever popular "Cloud Computing," as well as the VMware View lab for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

Site Recovery Manager was also more popular than ever.  Did you know that for every SRM lab served out, 2 Virtual Storage Appliances (VSA) were deployed, one at the "Protected Site", and one at the "Recovery Site?"  We are talking about thousands of FalconStor NSS-VA's, the VSA technology adopted by VMware as the storage and replication technology of choice to power the SRM lab!  Yes, which means, if you took the SRM Lab, you actually used and managed FalconStor Storage, with FalconStor's Storage Replication Adapter for SRM.  So did thousands of other attendees.

The beauty about virtualization is that it enables things to be completely transparent, elastic, and automated -- the platform enablement for the cloud.  FalconStor has been at the forefront of storage virtualization innovations, ever since its creation a decade ago.  Our Continous Data Protector (CDP) for SRM solution, is available as both a Virtual Appliance (NSS-VA), and in the form of a highly available physical system (CDP Gateway).  It was logical for VMware to pair FalconStor CDP with VMware vSphere to create the SRM Lab at VMworld 2010 (and also at VMworld 2009): ESX and its hosted VM's can run on pretty much any modern x86 servers, for the vSphere portion, while FalconStor CDP can enable remote replication and storage I/O acceleration on pretty much any storage platform (local disk, SAN, etc...), even if the 2 storage platforms on the Primary and Recovery Sites are not the same type of storage array make or model, and even if those arrays are not capable themselves of supporting advanced features such as remote replication or I/O acceleration.  This "heterogenous replication" capability is huge, especially with the growth in popularity of cloud computing, and it's available today.

With FalconStor CDP, and just as thousands of you have witnessed during the VMworld 2010 Lab sessions, Disaster Recovery for your datacenters can be enabled easily, efficiently, cost-effectively, and transparently.  Yes, hundreds of time an hour, VMware (well, really it was you, the lab attendees) deployed and  destroyed virtual datacenters, including the SAN Infrastructure and all of its data.  And hundreds of times an hour, FalconStor saved the world (well, not us, but again, you, the lab users, who were following the lab instructions!) by replicating the data to the remote site and recovering the protected Virtual Machines at the DR site successfully, simply at a click of a button.  That's the beauty of Storage Virtualization, and being "Totally Open!"

So when the 145,000th virtual machine was served out during the VMworld Lab session, I couldn't help thinking:  "Yes, it's that easy!"  Virtualization is really a beautiful thing, and only by virtualizing both your server and storage infrastructure can you achieve a level of automation, platform independence, transparency, and elasticity, that will bring full mobility in your public and private clouds.  So why put off until tomorrow what you can do today?