Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea Leverages FalconStor and VMware

FalconStor Software, Inc. announced that The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, one of London’s most prestigious boroughs, completed an upgrade to its storage management infrastructure with FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS).

The upgrade to FalconStor NSS is significant because it enables the Borough to leverage its existing storage arrays for use with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager in its VMware environment in order to provide automated disaster recovery. FalconStor NSS serves as the gateway for storage virtualization and replication, utilizing the Borough’s storage arrays and provisioning them as virtual disks to the VMware environment, enabling VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager in their multivendor SAN infrastructure.

“Upgrading to FalconStor NSS means we have gained the functionality of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, which we really needed,” said Barry Goodall, IT manager for The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea. “But we’re still entirely vendor neutral when it comes to choosing replacement storage arrays, some of which are entering their end-of-life phase now. This puts us in a stronger negotiating position with respect to the hardware vendors, saving taxpayers’ money without compromising the quality of our IT and storage infrastructure.”

"The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea is realizing the promise of server and storage virtualization through their use of FalconStor NSS with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager," said Thomas Barrett, vice president for Northern European Sales & Operations for FalconStor. "They are now reaping the benefits, maximizing their system and data availability and improving their physical resource utilization."

Other benefits of upgrading to FalconStor NSS includes access to advanced features, such as thin provisioning, and performance-enhancing benefits, such as true active-active failover for high data availability, leading to improved storage performance.

The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea first deployed FalconStor software solutions in 2005 and has remained a customer continuously since then. More than 20 terabytes of data are now under the management of its FalconStor NSS system. The solution manages both SAN and NAS, and replicates data between the Council’s primary and DR data centres.