FalconStor And Virtual Iron Team Up To Streamline Storage And Server Virtualization, Maximizing Manageability And Business Continuity

FalconStor Software Inc., the market leader in disk-based data protection solutions, and Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class software solutions for server virtualization, recently announced a global strategic alliance to offer integrated storage and server virtualization solutions to maximize IT productivity and business continuity for organizations of all sizes. The combined solutions improve data center resource management by increasing utilization of existing physical resources, optimizing virtual infrastructure performance through real-time data migration, and delivering more cost-effective and reliable high availability and disaster recovery. The companies will collaborate on marketing, sales, product integration and cross-support to OEM and reseller partners worldwide.

"The combination of Virtual Iron and FalconStor delivers comprehensive and easy to use virtual infrastructure and data protection capabilities," said Mike Kelson, Technical Director at Atlanta Technology Ltd., a UK-based hosted service provider. "Virtual Iron's LiveMigration provides transparent virtual machine mobility that allows us to perform no-downtime maintenance. FalconStor's equivalent storage migration capabilities allow simple and seamless movement of virtual machines between storage platforms. The combined efficiencies and advantages translate directly into increased flexibility and better performance for our customers."

The alliance between the companies leverages the entire suite of Virtual Iron server virtualization and FalconStor data protection and storage virtualization solutions without modification, providing a three-pronged approach to creating a centralized virtual infrastructure with integrated solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery, backup optimization and storage virtualization. The FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) and FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP) support both iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage and have been certified on the latest release of Virtual Iron, Version 4.2. The FalconStor solutions provide a number of unique capabilities for the Virtual Iron platform including:

• Storage Migration for Virtual Machines - Virtualization combined with built-in mirroring allows seamless migration between storage arrays without downtime.
• Extended support for a wide range of SMB and enterprise-class storage arrays already certified by FalconStor.
• Application-aware snapshot agents that provide transactionally-consistent snapshots of data for Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, SAP, and Oracle running in virtual machines.
• Thin provisioning for virtual machines maximizes disk space to optimize storage management within virtualized environments.

These capabilities allow Virtual Iron customers to take a storage-vendor agnostic approach to virtualize and provision storage resources for virtual machines. In addition to improving data center resource utilization, the FalconStor software optimizes the management of virtual infrastructure through real-time data migration, application-centric delta snapshots, rapid data recovery and optimized replication to support disaster recovery.

Virtual Iron's unique storage architecture allows storage and server IT users to fully exploit the value provided in storage servers provided by their storage system vendors. Standard capabilities in FalconStor software such as thin provisioning and application-aware snapshots can be directly used with Virtual Iron, significantly improving storage utilization and business continuity across any existing storage system vendor array.

"The server virtualization market is red hot and gaining rapid adoption as organizations strive to achieve physical server consolidation, maximize resource utilization and deploy disaster recovery solutions," said Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "In a recent survey of current and planned virtualization users, ESG discovered the importance of networked storage as 86% of the respondents that have implemented server virtualization use some form of networked storage to support their infrastructure requirements. The combination of capabilities from Virtual Iron and FalconStor will help customers streamline virtual infrastructure deployments, improve overall resource utilization and implement robust business continuity solutions."

Virtual Iron provides easy-to-use, enterprise-class server virtualization capabilities on a next-generation architecture. The platform combines the latest version of the Xen open source hypervisor with advanced virtualization services and policy-based automation capabilities such as LiveMigrate for easy movement of workloads, LiveRecovery for automated virtual machine failover, LiveCapacity for dynamic workload balancing, and LiveSnapshot for hot backup and patch management. These capabilities enable offloaded, space efficient and no-downtime backups on live virtual machines running in production environments. Virtual Iron also takes full advantage of the latest hardware virtualization extensions from Intel and AMD to deliver near native performance.

"Our customers are asking for a complete solution for managing virtual server and storage environments," said Greg Wolff, Area Vice President of Product Marketing at MPC Computers. "Our new DataFRAME 2112 SAN Appliance which is based on the FalconStor software platform combined with our NetFRAME Server portfolio which is certified to run Virtual Iron software, provides a complete data protection solution across both physical and virtual systems. By adding FalconStor software and Virtual Iron to our offerings, MPC is providing its customers with a level of infrastructure management flexibility, protection and cost efficiency not available from traditional physical server and storage environments."

"The combined FalconStor and Virtual Iron virtualization capabilities fully optimize user business continuity goals by streamlining live migration of virtual machine disks from one data storage system to another," said Bernie Wu, Vice President of Business Development at FalconStor. FalconStor's extensive experience in adding key data protection and storage virtualization features to any existing storage array investment provides Virtual Iron users immediate deployment flexibility and value."

"Independently, Virtual Iron and FalconStor anticipated advanced data center applications driven by workload mobility and policy-based automation to reduce the cost and complexity of data center operations. We designed our next generation architectures accordingly," said Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron. "Our joint customers benefit from an integrated server virtualization and storage virtualization solution that leverages existing investments and doesn't break existing practices."

Webcast

FalconStor and Virtual Iron will host a joint webcast on February 7^th, 2008, featuring the combined capabilities. To register, or for more information, please visit: https://virtualiron.webex.com/virtualiron/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=684896364..

About FalconStor
FalconStor Software, Inc. 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 technology-independent solutions, built upon the award-winning IPStor virtualization platform, include the industry leading VirtualTape 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 EMC, SUN, Brocade, H3C, IBM, and COPAN 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/en or call 1-866-NOW-FALC (669-3252).

About Virtual Iron Software, Inc.
Virtual Iron provides enterprise-class server virtualization software solutions that are easy to use and easy to afford. The software enables organizations of all sizes to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of managing and operating their data centers. The software includes advanced capabilities that leverage industry standards, open source economics and built-in hardware-assisted acceleration. Users leverage Virtual Iron to support a broad range of data center initiatives including server consolidation, development and test optimization, patch management, disaster recovery, capacity management and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Evaluation copies are available for free download at www.virtualiron.com/free. For more information, visit www.virtualiron.com or email info@virtualiron.com.

SOURCE: FalconStor Software Inc.