FalconStor Addresses Solid State, Rolls Out Clustered De-Dupe

FalconStor's had a busy week: The vendor announced a team-up with Solid State Disk (SSD) specialist Violin Memory today, just days after overhauling its core IPStor software and extending its partnership with former Huawei subsidiary H3C.

FalconStor is just the latest vendor to throw its weight behind SSD technology , announcing that its Network Storage Server (NSS) software has been certified to work with Violin Memorys 1010 SSD appliance.

The NSS storage virtualization software can now be used to boost the performance of Violin’s SSD hardware, according to Peter Eicher, FalconStor’s product marketing manager.

“We can take their memory device and virtualize disks on it, basically creating virtual disks,” said Eicher. “We can also provision the disks manually or dynamically to different applications.”

SSDs are undoubtedly a growing presence in the storage market , and the two vendors are already eyeing opportunities in data-intensive verticals such as the financial sector.”This makes use of the fast [SSD] data transfer rates for the busiest disk sectors,” says Eicher, adding that NSS will let users deploy the Violin hardware as a read/write cache appliance. “Certain applications will read or write from a specific disk area faster than others -- typically, it’s going to be database-type applications that are very transaction-intensive.”

Earlier this week, FalconStor unveiled version 6.0 of IPStor, which contains enhancements to NSS, as well as the vendor’s CDP and VTL solutions. Among the improvements is the addition of clustered de-duplication for CDP and NSS, making FalconStor one of the first de-dupe vendors to have the ability to de-duplicate data across multiple arrays instead of on just one drive. (Watch this space, however.) Another enhancement is a Central Client Manager (CCM) feature for managing the different FalconStor elements.

FalconStor has also added thin provisioning across the three software technologies, which the vendor is spinning as "thin disaster recovery."

The vendor claims its thin provisioning technology extends to remote and disaster recovery sites, hence the "thin DR" label. "It's not just on the primary allocation," says Eicher. "We're allowing you to provision end-to-end."

FalconStor also offered Hong Kong-based former Huawei subsidiary H3C a toehold in the U.S. storage market with the launch of IPStor 6.0.H3C, which was initially set up as a joint venture between Chinese technology giant Huawei, and U.S. networking specialist 3Com, will now OEM the software as part of a disk array earmarked for the American market.

”It’s a fully redundant, active/active controller,“ says Eicher. ”We will be making their hardware available through us and some of our resellers.”

The two vendors already have a close relationship, and H3C OEMs FalconStor’s IP San and VTL technology in the Chinese market.

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