Educational Institutions and School Districts Customers of FalconStor

FalconStor Software, Inc.
announced that higher educational institutions and school districts are using
FalconStor’s suite of data protection solutions to ensure students, faculty and
administrators have continuous access to information, regardless of downtime
resulting from IT maintenance, malicious acts or natural disasters.

With FalconStor’s solutions, organizations such as the Jefferson County Public
School District in Louisville, KY, Kingsborough Community College, Cape Fear
Community College, Central Carolina Community College, Ryerson University,
Victoria College and Santa Fe College, are simplifying their IT infrastructures
and reducing costs while enabling HA of applications.

Whether it’s a K-12 or a higher educational institute with an onsite
or a remote data center, FalconStor works with the IT teams and CIOs to
ensure that the data needed to operate is protected and easily
recoverable. Through HA products like the FalconStor Network Storage Server
(NSS), the FalconStor CDP and the FalconStor VTL, educational institutions are implementing storage
virtualization, data backup and continuous data protection. The implementations
help these organizations to realize overall cost savings associated with quick
data recovery times, data protection assurance, and reduced staff time
requirements.

"Regardless of the size of the
educational institution or school district, data is a critical component to
each organization. Without it, teachers and students would not have access to
required educational materials and the administration could not retrieve
student records or program details necessary for efficient management,"
said Fadi Albatal, VP of WW marketing for FalconStor. "And with the progressive transition to offer
more online educational resources and programs, we understand that applications
and data must be continually available as learning and education is a
year-round, 24/7 endeavor. For this reason FalconStor’s solutions ensure that
data is fully protected and always available."

Teaching and learning are ongoing processes. For this reason, IT
administrators must ensure that students and faculty are able to access
valuable information about everything from administrative planning to
coursework. Many colleges and higher educational institutions offer online
learning applications so that students can conduct research, study and
collaborate with classmates. Students interact at all times of the day, so
these schools cannot schedule downtime for maintenance and data backup. This is
only one reliance on the data center. Today, these institutions rely on email
for everything from daily correspondence to accepting applications and financial
records. This data is important and sensitive, so it is increasingly important
that it is fully protected against all forms of disasters – natural or
IT – related. Through the implementation of backup and automated data recovery
solutions, these IT departments are assured that none of the information can be
lost.

What education customers are saying:

"Victoria College is in
the potential hurricane disaster zone, so it is critical that we ensure that
students, faculty and administrators have access to applications and data
regardless of damage done to the data center. Utilizing a tape backup system
for our four TB of data required staff time on weekends and holidays and took
three days to complete," said Daniel Robinson, system administrator at
Victoria College in Victoria, TX. "FalconStor
NSS and FalconStor CDP immediately cut out that tape backup time, saving us
$800 to $1,000 per year, and allowed us to start replicating data to another
data center for complete disaster recovery."

"As a college based in
Northern Florida, where we frequently experience severe weather, we needed to
implement a DR strategy to ensure continuity of operations. FalconStor NSS
provides us with the ability to grow our storage infrastructure and allows us
to leverage resources from other vendors and SAN to easily replicate the data
to our other site location. Its snapshot functionality made it stand out from
market competition, including IBM. Even when we had a serious water leak that
destroyed one of our SANs, FalconStor NSS kept us up and running without an
issue," said Steve Williamson, systems and operations manager at Santa
Fe College in Gainesville, FL.

"Our goal at Central
Carolina Community College was to create a streamlined data protection solution
that works without interruption," said MontE Christman, associate
director of the IT department at Central Carolina Community College in Sanford,
NC. "With FalconStor CDP, we are
assured that all of the data for the student information system, virtual
servers, file servers and other applications are always available regardless of
the time of day, and that the system will be able to easily grow to handle our
expanding data. We are able to bring back our data if there is an issue within
a few hours. Restoring the server from tape would have taken at least a day."

"Our students and faculty
must be able to access their information 24/7, especially the Blackboard
e-learning and management system. When we had to backup to tape, the system had
to be taken off-line for several hours every week," said Casey
Carvalho, assistant director of technical services, Ryerson University in
Toronto. "We selected the FalconStor
NSS and FalconStor CDP solutions due to the company’s solid market reputation
for providing an open data protection platform. With these solutions, we
reduced our total storage infrastructure costs, eliminated the daily 30 minutes
of downtime, and simplified our environment by unifying our data backup and
DR for various components of our infrastructure."

"After Hurricane Irene
last fall, it became imperative that our college’s data be protected at an
off-site DR location to ensure that we may continue to operate regardless of
the weather. A number of our key applications do operate within the cloud, but
we have some on-site legacy systems and data across 133 servers that must be
available," said Asif Hussain, CIO of Kingsborough Community College
in Brooklyn, NY. "Using the
FalconStor VTL solution, we can easily replicate our data to an off-site,
physical location at another college within the City University of New York
(CUNY) system, ensuring that we will be able to restore files quickly if
another catastrophe were to occur at our main data center."

"In order to create a managed and
unified platform system that grows with our application and storage needs, we
had to move to a more simplified and centralized data protection structure.
This meant leveraging the benefits of virtualization while ensuring we had a
highly available enterprise platform storage solution," said Whitney
Roberts, manager of platform services for Jefferson County Public Schools in
Louisville, KY. "The FalconStor NSS
and FalconStor CDP solutions have the functionality and scalability to provide
such an environment and allow us to handle our expected data growth from our
current 200TB into PBs. Considering the myriad of technical products that the
school district has purchased in the past, FalconStor is one of the rare
products that has lived up to its reputation and has delivered more value than
what we paid for it."

"All of our students’
admissions and financial information is digitally scanned and saved and the
paper versions are shredded. It is critical that this information is stored,
continuously available and protected against IT problems and natural disasters,"
said Jakim Friant, Unix system administrator of Cape Fear Community College in
Wilmington, NC. "From the research
we have done, FalconStor CDP is the only data protection solution that can
effectively protect these replicated images at our off-site data center."