FalconStor And Radio Television Belge De La Communaute Francaise (RTBF) Broadcast A Storage Success Story

FalconStor Software, Inc., the market leader in disk-based data protection solutions, recently announced that Radio Television Belge de la Communaute Francaise (RTBF), one of Belgium's premier television and radio stations, has implemented the FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) solution powered by the FalconStor IPStor virtualization platform, to meet the storage consolidation and data protection challenges associated with a major restructuring of its business.

The deployment has enabled RTBF to consolidate data from seven remote sites into just two sites. RTBF has configured two NSS appliances - one at each site - that interact through Fibre Channel as a High Availability active cluster, enabling transparent failover and synchronous mirroring of data between the two sites, ensuring comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery contingency.

Christian Neybuch, Systems Engineer at RTBF, said: "One of the most important capabilities of the FalconStor NSS solution is that it gives us the ability to rapidly and easily switch from one site to the other or from one storage subsystem to the other on a single site. It gives us complete flexibility, while reducing the number of databases we need to consolidate our data storage in only two sites."

Vincent Pajot, Southern Region Director, FalconStor, said: "Resilient, scalable, and flexible storage infrastructures are indispensable for media outlets such as RTBF to protect their high-volume, data-intense operations. Their choice of our NSS solution for high performance and protection of their databases is a strong indication of FalconStor's abilities to serve the television and radio industry."

The FalconStor NSS manages RTBF's total storage capacity of 32TB that resides on four EMC CLARiiON units. Most of the data is comprised of Microsoft SQL Server data, with the remainder as unstructured user files created by RTBF's staff of more than a thousand employees. The application servers themselves run either Linux or Microsoft Windows.

RTBF achieves the level of protection it requires to manage its data through a combination of FalconStor NSS options:

• Replication option for Disaster Recovery (DR). FalconStor NSS facilitates the replication of mission-critical information between data centres, or between remote offices and data centres, via same or dissimilar hardware, using innovative remote replications, asynchronous mirroring, or synchronous mirroring over IP.
• TimeMark snapshots provide administrators the ability to instantly recover a single file, an entire volume, or an entire system back to a known good point in time. It creates periodic, scheduled or on-demand point-in-time delta snapshot copies of data volumes. These delta snapshots contain only data changes and therefore do not take up a significant amount of disk storage space.
• Application Snapshot Agents ensure transactional consistency for their Microsoft SQL application.
• Active-Active failover protects RTBF's storage infrastructure from any single point of failure, including network connectivity failures, storage connectivity failures, and storage device failures.
• Multipathing keeps data available if network switching or cabling fails by allowing the appliance to intelligently distribute input/output traffic across multiple FC ports to maximize efficiency and enhance system performance of the NSS managed storage.
• IP Trunking is used to unify all of the company's storage architecture.

About RTBF
Created in 1910, RTBF is the public television and radio network for the French-speaking Belgian community with 3 TV channels, La Une, La Deux and RTBF Sat and 5 radio channels, La Premiere, Vivacite, Musiq3, Classic 21, Pure FM, and RTBF International.

About FalconStor
FalconStor Software, Inc. #5 in Forbes' 2008 list of America's Fastest-Growing Technology Companies, is the market leader in disk-based data protection. We deliver proven, comprehensive data protection solutions that facilitate the continuous availability of business-critical data with speed, integrity, and simplicity. Our TOTALLY Open technology solutions, built upon the award-winning IPStor virtualization platform, include the industry leading Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with Single Instance Repository (SIR) for de-duplication, Continuous Data Protector (CDP), Storage Virtualization, and Replication for disaster recovery and remote office protection. Our products are available from major OEMs and solution providers including IBM, EMC, SUN, Acer, Brocade, H3C, MPC, and Pillar Data Systems and are deployed by thousands of customers worldwide, from small businesses to Fortune 1000 enterprises.

FalconStor is headquartered in Melville, N.Y., with offices throughout Europe and the Asia Pacific regions including Paris, Tokyo and Taiwan. For more information, visit: www.falconstor.com

SOURCE: FalconStor Software, Inc.