Continuous Backup and Assured Recovery for SMBs: Focus on Microsoft® Exchange

For many small and medium businesses data protection is an immediate and growing challenge. A company´s data - email, customer lists, financial transactions and database information - is the business...

Demystifying Data Deduplication: Choosing the Best Solution

Data deduplication has become a primary requirement for backup implementations. Although many vendors claim to offer the best data deduplication approach, results can vary based on a company’s unique needs. This white paper describes the key considerations when selecting a deduplication solution, helping you separate hype from reality...

Enabling Enterprise Tape Library Support for Microsoft DPM 2007 Using FalconStor VTL

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 is designed to provide continuous data protection for Windows-based servers, with additional features for business-specific Microsoft workloads such as SQL Server, Exchange, and SharePoint. The industry-leading FalconStor Virtual Tape Library (VTL) solution with Single Instance Repository (SIR) for deduplication complements Microsoft DPM 2007 to meet the data protection and recovery challenges of both Windows and non-Windows enterprise environments. Furthermore, it offers the ability to integrate Microsoft DPM 2007 with popular enterprise library tape systems such as IBM 3494, SUN/StorageTek ACSLS, and HP E-series. This is especially valuable for enterprises that need to move Microsoft DPM collected data to tape for regulatory or traditional archive purposes.

This paper explains how these technologies work together to provide full data protection coverage in any enterprise.

Global Application and SAN Acceleration with Solid-State Storage.

Solid-state storage or memory is an increasingly popular storage offering, providing many advantages in the areas of performance and reliability through quick response times and high rates of input/output operations per second (IOPS). This paper investigates the deployment models of solid-state storage and explains how FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) SAN Accelerator enhances this technology to deliver additional value through application-specific and global SAN acceleration.

Holistic and Efficient Protection for Oracle Databases with FalconStor CDP

In an enterprise Oracle environment, FalconStor® Continuous Data Protector (CDP) optimizes application and data availability as well as storage management capabilities.

Read this paper to lean how with FalconStor CDP:

• Oracle administrators can back up and recover data to any point in time.
• The product’s instant, granular rollback capability (via disk-based journaling) protects data from soft errors such as accidental deletions, corruption, or viruses.
• At any given point in time, an administrator can elect to roll back to a database status of minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months prior.
• Even individual database files or table spaces, deleted outside of Oracle supplemental data protection features, can be quickly retrieved and remain fully intact.

How Data Deduplication Works

IT departments face explosive data growth, driving up costs of storage for backup and disaster recovery (DR). For this reason, data deduplication is regarded as the next evolutionary step in backup technology and a “must-have” for organizations that wish to remain competitive by operating as efficiently as possible. With a focus on virtual tape library (VTL) interfaces, this paper explains how data deduplication technology from FalconStor Software supports backup and disaster recovery (DR) operations in a manner that exceeds other deduplication technologies.

Merging Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) Processes

For years, disaster recovery (DR) and data protection practices have consisted of two different technology islands — data protection and tape backup. The processes to implement both have usually been separate and handled by different IT departments. Enterprises have attempted to merge the two, but many still use different software products and different processes for replication and tape backup.

This paper describes how continuous data protection (CDP) technology can bridge various DR methodologies to help organizations overcome the challenges of tape and achieve maximum benefits from their IT investments.

Optimizing Blade Environments with IPStor

FalconStor´s IPStor software is the first solution to deliver storage pooling and storage services for blade servers, overcoming current limitations in blade technology and resulting in extremely manageable, secure data environments combining ultra-high availability and optimal performance.

Optimizing Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery Capabilities for Microsoft Exchange

Microsoft Exchange—widely popular and one of today’s leading business communication tools—is specifically designed to deliver high-volume collaboration capabilities, fast transaction rates, improved management and security features, and greater cost and infrastructure savings. As message volumes continue to grow, and file attachments consume endless gigabytes of disk space at both local and remote sites, the Exchange administrator is often left struggling to deal with this onslaught of data. Disk resources must continually be reconfigured. Backup times increase relentlessly, compounded by the fact that for purposes of regulatory compliance, email messages must often be stored for lengthy periods of time.

In order to better handle this situation, IT professionals today have a wealth of solutions to help implement best practices for optimizing their Exchange environments. The key is to make the right choice. The best selection is a comprehensive solution that delivers the entire gamut of storage services so that you are not left with a jumble of niche solutions, adding more work and frustration instead of alleviating it.

Optimizing Oracle RMAN and ASM Environments with FalconStor VTL and Integrated Deduplication

The importance of adequate backup and disaster recovery (DR) for Oracle databases cannot be emphasized enough. These databases continue to grow and drive additional business processes throughout enterprises of all sizes. But with all the challenges that IT faces – such as budget constraints, distributed data centers, ever-growing bandwidth and storage capacity needs, and trying to maintain consistent Oracle high availability – backup and DR procedures have become complex and costly.

FalconStor Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with integrated Single Instance Repository (SIR) deduplication technology offers advanced backup and global deduplication capabilities that support Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) and Automatic Storage Management (ASM). Together, these technologies can provide the high availability, data protection, manageability, and cost reduction that IT is searching for in Oracle implementations.

Replicate with Integrity: Protecting VMware Data to Ensure Fast Recovery, Business Continuity

As organizations increasingly adopt virtualization, they have begun to leverage remote replication as a means of increasing system availability. This is a simpler, more cost-efficient alternative to using traditional physical servers for disaster recovery (DR). However, utilizing simple replication in a virtual server DR plan provides only “crash consistent” virtual disk images, which can affect the consistency of file systems or applications and ultimately create longer recovery cycles. In addition, managing and coordinating resources between sites can be complex and challenging. This document addresses these issues and discusses how technologies from FalconStor Software and VMware work together to enable organizations to overcome these limitations and deliver application-consistent replication for automated DR in a virtual environment.

Simplifying DR: One-Button Replication for Combined Physical/Virtual Data Centers

Having a disaster recovery (DR) plan is mandatory. Most organizations recognize this – particularly those that have learned the hard way, when a disaster caught them unprepared. DR procedures have always been complicated for the physical server infrastructure, and the introduction of server virtualization has only made matters worse. VMware created vCenter Site Recovery Manager to streamline virtual server DR but physical infrastructure DR procedures have remained difficult and time-consuming.

FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP) can be deployed in conjunction with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager to empower the solution to automate and manage the DR process (both failover and failback) between entire heterogeneous physical and virtual infrastructures. This unique implementation dramatically speeds both processes and reduces costs while ensuring achievement of recovery time objectives (RTO).

Using FalconStor FDS as a Backup Target for EMC NetWorker

The FalconStor® File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) is a block-level data deduplication tool that provides a space-efficient repository for data from EMC NetWorker. With FalconStor FDS, you can reduce your backup management costs by dramatically reducing your disk storage needs, reducing your dependency on tape, and reducing off-site tape storage costs by enabling you to achieve longer retention periods on disk and facilitating replication of your backups to meet off-site requirements.

This document describes the basic concepts and integration guidelines for FalconStor FDS in an EMC NetWorker environment and explains the benefits of a combined solution.

The Value of Storage Virtualization

Over the past several years, virtualization has evolved from a popular buzzword into a formidable strategic technology that many organizations have adopted and many others are strongly considering. This white paper addresses the specific topic of storage virtualization and the ways in which it enhances the performance and efficiency of IT in light of today’s constant, sometimes staggering data growth. Within the context of storage networking issues, this document details the key elements of an effective, comprehensive storage virtualization solution, as well as the numerous potential cost benefits.

TOTALLY Open™ Disaster Recovery: The New Paradigm of Optimized, Cost-effective DR

There is no question about the importance of disaster preparedness. Organizations understand the imperative nature of implementing a well-thought-out and cohesive disaster recovery (DR) strategy to help them recover from natural or human-induced disasters. The DR process – a subset of the business continuity plan – is most effectively implemented using a lifecycle that includes analysis, solution design, implementation, testing and acceptance, and maintenance.

The DR process should include all policies and procedures needed to restore operations that are critical to the resumption of business. That includes restoring access to business data, all critical applications, and means of communication including electronic messaging, telephones, and fax, as well as workspace access and other business processes.

As you will see in the following pages, the technologies you select for DR can significantly impact the costs and risks you undertake in the DR process.

Using FalconStor CDP with Microsoft Exchange 2007

This technical white paper illustrates how to use FalconStor® Continuous Data Protector (CDP) to protect Microsoft Exchange 2007 servers and email databases. It also explains how continuous real-time data journaling and periodic snapshots provide simple, rapid, and granular recovery to any point in time.
The FalconStor CDP solution integrates tightly with Microsoft Exchange to enable seamless protection, automate and streamline data recovery, and optimize operational efficiency. It allows you to:

• Enable item-level recovery for your Exchange deployment.
• Satisfy the most demanding Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) - 5 minutes for email files, 10 minutes for systems.
• Achieve the best Recovery Point Objective (RPO) depending on the period you have defined for snapshots with transactional integrity (TimeMarks).
• Slash Exchange disaster recovery costs with WAN-optimized replication.

Using FalconStor CDP with Oracle 11g

This paper illustrates how to use FalconStor® Continuous Data Protector (CDP) to protect an Oracle 11g server and its database(s). It also explains how continuous real-time data journaling and periodic snapshots provide simple, rapid, and granular recovery to any point in time.

With FalconStor Continuous Data Protector, Oracle administrators can back up and recover data to any point in time. The product’s instant, granular rollback capability (via disk-based journaling) protects data from soft errors such as accidental deletions, corruption, or viruses. At any given point in time, an administrator can elect to roll back to a database status of minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months prior. Even individual database files or table spaces, deleted outside of Oracle supplemental data protection features, can be quickly retrieved and remain fully intact.

Using FalconStor FDS as a Backup Target for Veritas NetBackup

The FalconStor® File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) is a block-level data deduplication tool that provides a space-efficient repository for data from backup systems. With FalconStor FDS, you can reduce your backup management costs by dramatically reducing your disk storage needs, reducing your dependency on tape, and reducing off-site tape storage costs by enabling you to achieve longer retention periods on disk and facilitating replication of your backups to meet off-site requirements.

This document describes the basic concepts and integration guidelines for FalconStor FDS in a Veritas NetBackup™ environment and explains the benefits of a combined solution.

Virtually Effortless Backup for VMware Environments

The most common method of backing up virtual machines is to use backup software agents inside each virtual machine at the operating system level. These are the same decades-old agents used for physical server backups, so the process is well understood — but it doesn’t fit the virtual machine paradigm for several reasons:

• CPU and memory constraints.
• Downtime and complexity.
• Network bottleneck.

To address the limitations of traditional agent-based backups, VMware has designed VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), but it too has limitations.

Read this paper to find out how FalconStor® HyperTrac™, an extension of FalconStor NSS, enables you to offload VCB backup processes entirely from the production VMware ESX servers, freeing up valuable resources in your production environment and eliminating any impact on storage services. The backup window is eliminated, allowing backups to complete through VCB at any time — even during your busiest hours.

WAN-optimized Heterogeneous Replication: Revolutionize Your IT Efficiency

Data replication has become increasingly popular in small and large organizations, primarily for minimizing downtime associated with backup and disaster recovery (DR). Replication also enables organizations to use data in more than one way at a time. For example, if you replicate a database, you can continue using the original data set for production operations while using the copy to load a data warehouse or perform application testing. Remote replication can improve the backup process and shrink the backup window to virtually nothing. Many organizations take snapshots of their data, replicate it to a remote location, and complete the backup-to-tape process from the remote site. The primary site can immediately return to normal business functions, reducing downtime and enabling the speedy resumption of production (and revenue-generating) operations.

With most of the solutions on the market, changing even a single bit of data requires a cluster of kilobytes to be written over the wire — but the bulk of this is redundant data (re-writes) or white space. With FalconStor replication solutions, only the actual changes at the disk-sector level are transferred for replication and storage on the target side.

Read this white paper to see how FalconStor replication solutions have enabled an actual client to achieve 84% savings in WAN bandwidth and reduce storage capacity by 630%.

Optimizing Storage for VDI Deployments

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is poised to provide a new management and deployment model for end-user computing by centralizing the physical desktops to virtualized desktop farms in the data center. The resulting environment offers increased manageability, enhanced security and data protection, while providing new capabilities such as anywhere, anytime access for teleworkers. The risk, of course, lies in end-user performance expectations and the return on investment (ROI). Ideally, a VDI solution will provide an equal or better end-user experience than a physical desktop while keeping the deployment cost at par or lower than desktop deployment costs. If these objectives are met, the significant operational cost savings will support an immediate migration toward VDI for the majority of organizations.

Using FalconStor VTL as a Backup Target for IBM i (iSeries)

By introducing FalconStor VTL into an IBM i environment, you can non-disruptively replace tape backup with disk to accelerate backup/recovery and improve operational efficiency. This technical white paper explains how to configure FalconStor VTL with IBM i to leverage capabilities such as native backup integration, IPL bare-metal recovery, and direct tape support with encryption to maximize return on your IBM i investments.

FalconStor VTL Migration Scenarios: Integrating Data Deduplication into Existing Data Protection Environments

Learn how to migrate to the latest version of FalconStor VTL technology with integrated data deduplication to quickly reap the benefits of a reduced storage footprint. Together, FalconStor and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) have devised an easy process for integrating deduplication functionality into older VTL environments, with minimal downtime and disruption, and maximum value.

RecoverTrac: Automated Service-oriented Disaster Recovery

Protecting your data means nothing if you can`t recover it. One of the greatest data center challenges today is ensuring a smooth recovery of operations after downtime. Downtime can be caused by data loss or corruption, equipment failure, or a complete site outage after a loss of power or a natural disaster. In particular, resuming operations at a disaster recovery (DR) site, whether planned (such as a scheduled site migration) or unplanned (such as an accidental event) requires careful preparation. The planning will take months, but the execution of the plan needs to occur within minutes. During these precious minutes, all of the teams involved will be put under pressure to carry on their recovery procedures in a coordinated fashion. Anything could go wrong during the dozens, if not hundreds, of steps performed by the application, hardware, network, and storage teams. A human error, a process flaw, a routing issue, pretty much anything could delay the site recovery. For many, this herculean effort is, simply put, risky and unpredictable.

FalconStor believes that DR automation should not be this complex, and has a great deal of expertise and experience in this sector. As a result, FalconStor has engineered RecoverTrac™, a universal DR orchestrator that automates complex DR tasks, bringing service-oriented recovery to both physical and virtual server infrastructures. This technical white paper discusses the concerns associated with DR, and explains in detail how RecoverTrac technology addresses a full range of DR challenges.

Taking VMware VAAI to the Next Dimension

Break through storage barriers. Extend your use of VMware vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) across any heterogeneous SAN environment. This technical paper explores the strengths of VMware VAAI and uncovers how to fully leverage these benefits using the FalconStor NSS Gateway Appliance. Read it to learn how to extend the power of VMware VAAI and get the highest return on your technology:

• Remove VMware VAAI storage array compliance limitations 
• Eliminate single array enclosure constraints 
• Enable VMware VAAI to operate across multiple storage arrays

Best Practices for Optimizing IT: A Model for Data Services

An optimized IT model is one that embraces advancements in server and storage technologies such as virtualization, data deduplication, continuous data protection, WAN optimization, and thin provisioning to enable a more service-oriented approach to IT. This paper outlines the best practices for implementing an optimized IT model to simplify IT and make it more cost-effective and operationally efficient.

Best Practices for Data Migration Using FalconStor NSS

Many organizations postpone data migration for fear of downtime – a decision that can impact business in many ways. FalconStor NSS technology solves this challenge by providing non-disruptive data migration, including any-to-any movement between protocols and systems. By enabling customers to seamlessly migrate to newer, high-efficiency storage, FalconStor NSS helps to eliminate islands of storage, uncover “hidden” storage space, and increase overall storage efficiencies. This white paper outlines several ways to perform data migration, including best practices that will reap the highest return on migration projects.