FalconStor Software, Inc. announced FalconStor Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) for VMware Site Recovery Manager. VMware Site Recovery Manager is a pioneering new product for disaster recovery management and automation. Part of VMware's industry-leading suite of management and automation products for the datacenter, VMware Site Recovery Manager simplifies business continuity planning and testing, and reduces the risk and complexity associated with implementing disaster recovery.

Following an extensive VMware qualification process, FalconStor is launching a new SRA for VMware Site Recovery Manager that will enable customers to integrate VMware Site Recovery Manager with FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) appliances to provide an integrated, automated disaster recovery solution, ensuring customers that their virtualized applications will failover in a remote disaster recovery site with speed and integrity.

"Disaster recovery is one of the most common factors driving customer adoption and standardization of the VMware platform," said Parag Patel, vice president, alliances, at VMware. "VMware Site Recovery Manager introduces disaster recovery automation and management capabilities that reduce the risk, cost, and complexity of organizations' disaster recovery plans. FalconStor has been working closely with us to integrate its technology with VMware Site Recovery Manager to provide our customers with efficient ways to ensure faster, automated disaster recovery."

Although organizations face an urgent need for effective and efficient disaster recovery, recovering from site failures remains one of the most difficult and complex aspects of IT. Traditional disaster recovery solutions are slow and prone to failures because they involve many complex manual steps, are difficult to test, often take longer than expected to validate application data integrity, and require expensive duplication of the production data center infrastructure.

As a result, organizations find themselves unable to provide sufficient disaster recovery protection within their desired timeframe and budget for more than a select few of their important production systems.

The FalconStor Storage Replication Adapter for VMware Site Recovery Manager continues the work that FalconStor has been doing as a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner program. The complete FalconStor DR solution for the VMware platform includes the following advanced features:

• Application Snapshot Director complements Site Recovery Manager to ensure any active application data can be replicated in real time with full transactional integrity to remote Disaster Recovery sites
• MicroScan Thin Storage Replication uses the least amount of WAN bandwidth possible, providing further ongoing DR WAN infrastructure savings
• Support for local physical server failover into remote virtual machines, ensuring all virtual machines are recovered during a disaster while eliminating the costs of additional physical application server requirements for remote DR site equipment
• Snapshot Agents for business applications ensure extensive integrity checking after a DR event. Applications protected by FalconStor software running on both physical and virtual machines are always integrity- and DR failover-ready
• Thin provisioning of local and remote DR site storage reduces the overall storage acquisition costs and lowers long-term power consumption

"The ability to improve disaster recovery processes is quickly becoming a number one driver for server virtualization deployments. In a recent ESG survey of current and planned adopters, 26% of companies are currently replicating virtual machine images to a remote site and another 39% are planning to," said Mark Bowker, analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group. "The FalconStor Storage Replication Adapter combined with the FalconStor Application Snapshot Director for VMware Infrastructure, MicroScan Replication, and flexible storage platform enable VMware Site Recovery Manager to provide a more efficient and integrated way to ensure that business applications are available and ready to rapidly restore business operations when local or site wide outages occurs."

"FalconStor is pleased to work with VMware to make disaster recovery simpler and more automated to enable faster application availability," said Bernie Wu, vice president of Business Development at FalconStor. "FalconStor and VMware customers are excited to deploy the combination of FalconStor and VMware DR solutions. This complete offering will provide current and future customers with a powerful and more affordable disaster recovery solution across any data center, reducing the risk, cost and complexity associated with traditional disaster recovery approaches."

The FalconStor Storage Replication Adapter for VMware Site Recovery Manager is expected to be available for separate download at VMware's website as well as on FalconStor's website. FalconStor is offering free activation of its Storage Replication Adapter to its customers who register their download.

FalconStor will be offering a comprehensive Disaster Recovery Solution bundle for VMware customers that include all the necessary software components to complement VMware Site Recovery Manager. This bundled solution will be available to FalconStor's solution provider channel.

FalconStor is working with its strategic industry partners, including Acer, H3C, MPC, Pillar Data Systems, and SUN, to ensure they can obtain VMware Site Recovery Manager qualification.