HDS Migrates With FalconStor

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)'s professional services organization will use FalconStor Software Inc.'s (Nasdaq: FALC) new data migration appliance to persuade potential customers to migrate their data off competitors' boxes and onto HDS storage arrays, company officials say (see HDS Picks FalconStor).

Once the migration has taken place, FalconStor hopes HDS's customers will like the product enough to want to buy it.

"To copy EMC Corp. [NYSE: EMC] data to Hitachi, for example, normally takes days," says Wayne Lam, VP and co-founder of FalconStor. "Often the sales cycle for Hitachi drags on as the customer is concerned about downtime and how long the migration to the new technology will take."

With the same goal in mind, Hitachi Ltd. sells an OEM version of DataCore Software Corp.'s SANsymphony storage virtualization software in Japan (see DataCore Scores Hitachi, at Last).

FalconStor's PC-based data migration appliance, powered by its IPStor software running on Linux, should provide data transport between storage systems without interrupting access to data in a production environment, the company claims. There's no need to shut down application hosts during migration, says Lam. SANgate Systems Inc. also makes a data migration appliance targeted at the open systems market (see SANgate Demos Appliance).Arthur Bitts, senior systems engineer at Cummins Inc., a power company headquartered in Columbus, Ind., has tested the technology and gives it the thumbs up. "The data migration with IPStor was completely transparent to our end users, who were able to conduct business as usual," he says.

FalconStor says the migration appliance extends its customer base beyond the data center to midrange and smaller businesses that host their disaster recovery sites at managed service providers (MSPs). MediaPoint, an MSP in Boston, is testing the technology as a way to offer remote disaster recovery services to its customers.

IPStor enables replication from any storage system -- including direct-attached storage devices -- over any platform or protocol. It offers asynchronous mirroring, for extending the distance of a mirror to remote locations, as well as replication over Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and SCSI, extending the replication protocol to include local- or remote-attached SCSI or FC disks using a single IPStor for online or nearline disk-based backup and restore.

Early next month, FalconStor is set to announce version 4 of its software, which it expects to ship later this quarter. Major components of the new software, which was last updated in May 2002, include data migration and performance optimization features (see FalconStor Broadens Appeal).

FalconStor is keeping schtum on most of the details of IPStor 4 until its release, but we did glean a couple of things. Its bare-metal recovery feature, which keeps an updated image of a server running in the event of a hard disk failure, is supposed to put an end to the nightmare of recovering data from tape and reinstalling applications and operating systems after such a failure.Another potentially juicy new feature -- hotzone performance optimization -- identifies the most frequently used data and moves it to solid-state disk (SSD), making retrieval of this data six times faster than it would be from disk systems, according to FalconStor, which claims it's ideal for online transaction processing (OLTP) and government research applications. FalconStor is partnering with Texas Memory, Imperial Technology, and TiGi Corp. to provide the SSD technology (see Imperial Snaps Out of It and FalconStor Gets Solid With Imperial).

News of the HDS deal did little to lift FalconStor's stock Tuesday. It closed at $3.80, down 2.6 percent, in line with a general market decline.

FalconStor will report its fourth-quarter earnings after the market closes on Jan. 29. For its third quarter, revenues increased 20 percent to $2.9 million while operating expenses remained flat, leaving the pro forma net loss at $2 million, versus $2.5 million in the prior quarter (see FalconStor Boosts Sales, Shrinks Loss