FalconStor Customers Achieve Continuous Data Availability With CDP

FalconStor Software, Inc. announced that many of its customers are experiencing dramatic efficiencies and increased data availability for their data centers using FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP). FalconStor CDP allows customers to deploy unified backup and disaster recovery (DR), to reduce dependence on tape backup for restores and to create continuously available data center environments, while reducing operating expenses.

FalconStor CDP helps organizations change their approach to backup and recovery by replacing cumbersome tape-based backup with a flexible, granular disk-based process that allows IT managers to set their recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) according to the unique service-level agreement (SLA) requirements for each server or application. The integrated backup and DR provides instant recovery from disk to replace time-consuming restores and to minimize the use of tape. In addition, FalconStor CDP includes remote replication for rapid, comprehensive DR and WAN optimization that ensures business continuity and reduces costs.

FalconStor CDP customers have increased choice and flexibility because FalconStor provides multiple deployment models for the solution, helping to drive down costs based on individual requirements. FalconStor CDP is available as a physical or a virtual appliance and is an ideal solution to protect hybrid environments at the primary site while enabling a fully virtualized DR site. Because it is an open solution, FalconStor CDP works with any application, any server platform, over any networking protocol and on any vendor’s storage.

“Our customers are realizing significant benefits from the flexibility and granularity of FalconStor’s disk-based backup and DR offering. FalconStor CDP is the only data protection solution that combines advanced technologies – including disk virtualization, snapshot with deduplication, WAN optimization and recovery process management – in one unified product that replaces the old backup methods with a scalable, reliable and verifiable technology that will carry into the next decade,” said Alex Jiang, vice president of global marketing for FalconStor Software. “FalconStor is committed to helping our customers eliminate the backup window, enjoy continuous access to their data and gain tremendous operational and cost efficiencies.”

FalconStor CDP benefits

• Replaces cumbersome restores from tape with instant recovery from disk while using tape for long-term data retention and archiving.
• Recovers business operations quickly and reliably, so files, databases, mail stores and entire systems are brought back online in minutes, minimizing business impact. Individual servers can be recovered in as little as five minutes, while entire DR sites can be brought online in as little as 30 minutes in the event of a full data center failure.
• Eliminates the backup window by removing any impact of backup processes on production systems and applications.
• Typically cuts total DR costs in half by replicating data across heterogenous storage systems, protocols and virtual/physical boundaries and reducing bandwidth requirements over the WAN by 70 to 90 percent.  
• Verifies and ensures business continuity with easy verification and DR testing that gives customers the confidence that systems will work as expected when needed.
• Maximizes operational efficiency. FalconStor is the only vendor that can provide a standard backup and recovery process throughout the enterprise, no matter what the applications, storage systems or networking protocols.

What Customers are Saying about FalconStor CDP

The Canadian Township of Scugog was able to shorten the recovery time for its mission-critical Oracle database that runs its financial application from hours to just minutes. “FalconStor CDP enabled the Township of Scugog to recover from a mission-critical application failure of its Oracle database and be back in operation in 20 minutes – proof that its data is fully protected and continuously available under any circumstances,” said Shawn Mears of GDL Consulting and Infrastructure Lead for the Township of Scugog.  “The FalconStor solution did everything that we hoped it would do, and it was a pretty painless procedure; in comparison, restoring from incremental and tape backups could take hours, or even days.”

Strand Associates, Inc., an engineering firm based in Madison, Wisc., with 11 offices in the United States, was able to consolidate its backup and DR processes into one continuous standard procedure across all of its remote sites. Strand replaced daily tape backups with disk-based snapshots and weekly backups to tape, saving 85 percent in time and operating costs. “We had to design a data protection infrastructure that would allow users to recover data (such as CAD files) as quickly as possible to avoid recreating work,” said Justin Bell, network administrator at Strand Associates. “We needed to execute approximately 800 restore jobs in the last year, which would have been extremely time consuming and expensive with tape; however, with FalconStor CDP it takes just minutes to perform one restore.”

Earth Rangers, a Canadian non-profit organization that inspires children to have a positive impact on the environment, was able to eliminate backup to tape entirely, saving the planet from a few more unnecessary carbon emissions. “FalconStor CDP is one of the elements that allows the Earth Rangers Center facility to have a light impact on the environment, which is part of our mission to educate about environmentally sustainable practices,” said Robert Di Stefano, IT systems manager for Earth Rangers. “With FalconStor CDP, we deployed a disk-based backup system that eliminates the need for daily tape backups and allows us to restore quickly lost or corrupted files from disk on a very granular level.  There is an indirect positive impact on the environment with this system, since we are no longer burning fossil fuel to truck copies of our data on tape to a remote location for safe keeping.”

Vertafore, Inc. a large technology and information solutions company for the insurance industry with more than 380 terabytes of data under management, customized its FalconStor CDP deployment to meet the firm’s stringent SLA requirements, eliminating inefficient backup windows and restores from tape. "Vertafore has seen increased performance gains as a result of the FalconStor CDP deployment,” said Chris Munoz, vice president of hosting services for Vertafore. “Prior to FalconStor, we saw a large amount of overhead on the SQL servers, long backup windows and frequent, unreliable tape restores. Now we can instantly access and restore from any recovery point within a 14-day period via consistent snapshots. These snapshots, along with replication, have enabled us to reduce the need for tape backups down to only once a week (offline) for long-term archiving with zero impact to the Microsoft SQL servers. FalconStor’s easy-to-deploy, non-intrusive data protection environment provides a unified platform for backup and DR, incremental snapshots for precise recovery points and remote data validation to help us reach maximum operating efficiency.”

Financial services firm Maxim Group LLC saves time and money with FalconStor CDP, which supports the company’s DAS environment, by increasing backup efficiency and reducing downtime. “We were using servers with direct attached storage (DAS) for daily disk-to-disk backup; the volume of data was overwhelming and restore times were unacceptable. In addition, we needed to better manage the offsite replication of all corporate data,” said John Michaels, chief technology officer at Maxim Group. “FalconStor CDP let us preserve our DAS configuration while providing data security and protection. Increased operational efficiencies and cost savings have strengthened our bottom line as a result of reduced data volumes and minimized bandwidth requirements.”

CyberLink Corp., renowned for its flagship product, PowerDVD, and headquartered in Taipei with offices across the globe including North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region, needed to optimize the reliability of mission-critical applications to ensure continuous data availability. "CyberLink´s global operations heavily rely on e-mail systems to conduct businesses and to communicate with regional offices, customers and partners worldwide," said Casper Chang, CIO of Cyberlink. "With FalconStor CDP, in case of system failure, the entire physical Microsoft Exchange server can be recovered seamlessly over to a virtual server (physical to virtual recovery) within 10 minutes.  This ensures that our daily business operations will not be affected at all."