FalconStor NSS Gateway Achieves VMware Certification

FalconStor Software, Inc. announced that FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) Gateway, its storage virtualization and data protection solution, is now certified for VMware Infrastructure 3. VMware’s storage virtualization device certification completes FalconStor’s open storage virtualization and DR products for VMware environments employing VMware Site Recovery Manager – enabling fast, reliable, simple and hardware-independent recovery from data center failures.

FalconStor NSS Gateway is an enterprise-class SAN solution that acts as a storage virtualization and replication gateway to existing storage arrays from any vendor, provisioning virtual disks to VMware ESX and enabling VMware Site Recovery Manager in multivendor SAN environments. FalconStor NSS Gateway stands out among VMware-certified storage virtualization devices as an open software-based storage virtualization gateway.

"We believe FalconStor NSS Gateway is an ideal storage virtualization solution for VMware virtualized environments for three reasons," said Bernie Wu, vice president of business development for FalconStor Software. "First, it is an open storage virtualization and provisioning platform that provides VMware customers the freedom to choose any VMware-certified storage hardware both locally and at remote DR sites; second, it enables VMware Site Recovery Manager capability on any VMware-certified hardware and performs a WAN-optimized replication service that saves time and money; third and most important, with our patented application-aware snapshot capabilities, FalconStor NSS performs fast and transactionally consistent recovery from data center failures."

"The promise of server virtualization and consolidation is to maximize system and data availability, improve physical resource utilization and minimize management time and cost – while saving on data center footprint and power and cooling requirements," said Dave Russell, research vice president, Storage Technologies & Strategies, at Gartner. "For storage virtualization to fully contribute to this promise, it must enable integrated data protection and high availability independent of the physical configuration of the storage infrastructure."

Today, FalconStor NSS Gateway enables any Fibre Channel SAN on the VMware Hardware Compatibility List with VMware Site Recovery Manager integration, WAN-accelerated replication and a broad range of application-aware snapshot support. FalconStor NSS Gateway data protection services for VMware environments include the following advanced features:

• Primary data center and DR site storage hardware can be any mix of heterogeneous equipment – providing customers with the freedom to use multi-vendor storage array deployments.
• Application Snapshot Director for VMware ESX complements VMware Site Recovery Manager to ensure active application data (Microsoft SQL Server, Sharepoint and Exchange; Oracle Database; Lotus Notes; Sybase Database Management; and IBM DB2) can be replicated with full transactional integrity to remote DR sites.
• FalconStor MicroScan Thin Storage Replication optimizes WAN bandwidth utilization for more efficient primary-to-DR-site replication, further enabling faster fail-back operations.
• Support for failover of local physical servers to remote virtual machines ensures that all virtual machines are recovered during a disaster, eliminating the cost of additional server hardware for remote DR sites and assisting the data center transition to VMware Infrastructure.
• Snapshot agents for business applications ensure data integrity so that applications running on both physical and virtual machines are always failover-ready.
• Thin provisioning of all local and remote storage reduces overall storage acquisition costs and lowers long-term power consumption.

"FalconStor Software has worked closely with VMware to certify its storage virtualization and data protection solutions for VMware Infrastructure," said Parag Patel, vice president, alliances, for VMware. "With its support for heterogeneous storage platforms, FalconStor NSS Gateway gives VMware Site Recovery Manager customers great flexibility in planning and implementing cost-effective DR deployments."

W. R. Berkley Corporation, a financial services company focused on the property and casualty insurance business, has implemented FalconStor NSS Gateway in a VMware Infrastructure environment. For DR, VMware virtual machines are replicated to a remote DR site using the FalconStor NSS Application Snapshot Director. "We have realized considerable efficiencies in going with VMware for our virtual infrastructure," said Tom Whelans, vice president of operations for Berkeley Technology Services, the IT service operation of W.R. Berkeley. "With FalconStor NSS, we are able to replicate application-aware snapshots at a remote location, giving us the ability to failover to the DR site at any point in time. We are quite pleased with the way FalconStor and VMware solutions work together."