Tech Alert: Manage Storage Silos and Islands With Software-Defined Storage

MELVILLE, NY--(Marketwired - Aug 18, 2015) - Let's face it; embracing new storage technologies, capabilities, and upgrading to new hardware often results in added complexity and costs. The reality is that when IT equipment, platforms, and applications do not integrate with one another, the resulting "sprawl" of storage islands and silos on disparate systems can be costly, risky, disruptive, and time-consuming. But it does not have to be that way. The experts at FalconStor Software® Inc. (NASDAQ: FALC) say software-defined storage can ease many of these integration and management pains.

Few organizations have the luxury of performing a massive "rip and replace," or maintaining completely identical infrastructures for primary and secondary storage. Hardware/platform incompatibility, different system generations, different architectures, and different media types can compromise even the most diligent efforts at protecting and replicating business data.

"Software-defined storage implemented at the network fabric layer, abstracted from the underlying hardware, will bypass storage sprawl issues because it standardizes all tools, data services, and management," said Pete McCallum, Director, Data Center Solutions at FalconStor. "For example, Fibre Channel replication requires a different hardware infrastructure from Fibre Channel over IP, incurring complexity and extra costs. But, a software-defined storage environment that views the ecosystem as a unified pool of resources, will maximize efficiency and keeps costs down."

Horizontal, software-defined storage deployed across the infrastructure in a common way will accommodate storage silos on geographically dispersed data centers, locally on different storage systems, or across physical and virtual infrastructures. Software-defined storage eliminates the accumulation of point solutions, and regards all storage as equal. This enables the delivery of common data services like migration, continuity, recovery, and optimization that can be executed consistently across the entire storage infrastructure. That reduces complexity, the numbers of silos to manage as well as lowers licensing costs for data services array by array.

"Considering real-world budgets, storage silos will probably never be entirely eliminated," said McCallum. "The key to solving the problem is not to solve it at all, but to work with it, through a truly horizontal software-defined storage platform that can marry unlike infrastructures, including arrays, servers, hypervisors and the cloud."

FalconStor's FreeStor™ technology optimizes storage resources regardless of type, connectivity, brand or speed into a storage resource pool and can be provisioned to physical or virtual applications. FreeStor accomplishes this by providing a massively scalable "storage hypervisor"coupled with a data services engine and automation. As a result, IT organizations are able to ease the provisioning and management of storage resources with the right level of performance, protection and recovery, regardless of their underlying physical storage assets. FreeStor is well suited for organizations using legacy technology and wanting to move to newer technologies, such as flash, or looking to leverage private or hybrid clouds. For MSPs looking to move data into their cloud and provide common data management services, or OEMs wanting to provide a full, robust set of data management services.

About FalconStor
FalconStor^® Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: FALC) is a leading software-defined storage company offering a converged data services software platform that is hardware agnostic. Our open, integrated flagship solution FreeStor™ reduces vendor lock-in and gives enterprises the freedom to choose the applications and hardware components that make the best sense for their business. We empower organizations to modernize their data center with the right performance, in the right location, all while protecting existing investments. FalconStor's mission is to maximize data availability and system uptime to ensure nonstop business productivity while simplifying data management to reduce operational costs. Our award-winning solutions are available and supported worldwide by OEMs as well as leading service providers, system integrators, resellers and FalconStor. The company is headquartered in Melville, N.Y. with offices throughout Europe and the Asia Pacific region. For more information, visit www.falconstor.com or call 1-866-NOW-FALC (866-669-3252).

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FalconStor, FalconStor Software, FreeStor, and Intelligent Abstraction are trademarks or registered trademarks of FalconStor Software, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All other company and product names contained herein may be trademarks of their respective holders.