FalconStor Certifies QLogic 8Gb FC HBAs and Switches

FalconStor Software, Inc. and QLogic Corp.  announced that FalconStor has certified QLogic 8Gb Fibre Channel adapters and SANbox switches for use with the FalconStor Virtual Tape Library (VTL), FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP), and FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) solutions, to deliver enhanced performance and scalability of FalconStor storage virtualization, data protection, and disaster recovery solutions.

Adding support for the QLogic 8Gb Fibre Channel infrastructure reiterates the FalconStor Software commitment to deliver highly integrated and TOTALLY Open solutions.  Thanks to rigorous testing for complete interoperability, mutual customers can now easily and affordably deploy QLogic 8Gb Fibre Channel products across FalconStor solutions. QLogic 8Gb Fibre Channel end-to-end solutions are designed to fulfill the ever-increasing need of enterprise-class business applications for maximum performance. 8Gb Fibre Channel doubles the performance of today’s 4Gb Fibre Channel products while maintaining full backward compatibility with the large installed base of 4Gb and 2Gb Fibre Channel solutions.

"FalconStor Software’s solutions for data protection, optimized backup, and virtualization have always leveraged the fastest Fibre Channel speeds available," said Frank Berry, vice president of corporate marketing at QLogic. "Our QLogic 8Gb Fibre Channel adapters and switches qualified by FalconStor are fully backward-compatible with 4Gb and 2Gb Fibre Channel legacy products. Today, FalconStor customers can confidently begin to migrate to 8Gb Fibre Channel storage networks, doubling the performance of their current infrastructure."

"The certification of FalconStor VTL, CDP, and NSS solutions is part of our ongoing commitment to help customers build and utilize a more efficient and cost-effective SAN, while meeting their growing data requirements," said Bernie Wu, FalconStor vice president of business development. "By leveraging FalconStor software’s any-to-any connectivity together with QLogic technology, our customers have the ability to create a powerful Fibre Channel SAN solution that is easy to use, cost-effective, and scalable."

The FalconStor VTL provides large organizations with high-performance enterprise-level disk-based data protection to meet backup demands, simplify tape management, and enhance tape security. Leveraging an 8GB Fibre Channel SAN, FalconStor VTL significantly shrinks the backup window and improves the speed and dependability of data backup and recovery, as well as Service Level Agreements (SLAs). FalconStor VTL delivers global deduplication without impacting the backup window. With deduplication, only unique data blocks are replicated to the remote site, slashing network traffic over 95 percent. Offering multi-node scalability, FalconStor VTL emulates vast arrays of tape libraries, drives, and cartridges, ensuring complete backup transparency.

FalconStor CDP provides advanced disk-based data protection to enable continuous application availability for physical and virtual environments. The 8GB Fibre Channel support allows for more effective data replication and recovery, while enabling FalconStor Software’s backup acceleration features to shrink the backup windows by eight times. The faster speed also improves SLAs and enhances the FalconStor MicroScan replication and compression feature within FalconStor CDP and NSS, to minimize network bandwidth requirements. This allows businesses to fully leverage virtualization technology to consolidate servers, minimize space utilization, and streamline management.

FalconStor NSS storage virtualization solution delivers enterprise-class performance, reliability, and heterogeneous storage management. Application performance speed and SLAs are significantly enhanced by taking advantage of an 8Gb Fibre Channel SAN.  Data snapshots can be readily and promptly used for data protection and recovery.  FalconStor NSS also uses thin provisioning to improve storage utilization and maximize ROI.

The QLogic 8Gb Network
The QLogic 8Gb Fibre Channel Storage Network is the only end-to-end 8Gb Fibre Channel SAN available today, consisting of PCI Express adapters, blade server adapters and switches. QLogic 8Gb Fibre Channel Storage Network is on the leading edge of a wave of new Fibre Channel, Ethernet, FCoE and InfiniBand storage networking technologies capable of delivering quantum increases in SAN performance. The new, higher performance SAN technologies are arriving just in time to prevent bottlenecks resulting from massive I/O aggregation driven by the deployment of dense compute nodes consisting of blade servers, multi-core processors and server virtualization.

The QLogic 8Gb Fibre Channel Storage Network is also representative of products designed for ‘green’ computing environments where recyclable materials, space savings and energy efficiency are important. For example, SANblade 2500 adapters feature Adaptive Power Management — the unique ability to sense the type of PCI Express present and power only the number of lanes required to achieve maximum performance and maximum energy efficiency.