FalconStor at VMworld

FalconStor's Fadi Albatal, VP of Product Marketing, brought me up to date on what the company was planning to display at VMworld in San Francisco this week. FalconStor has always struck me as an innovative company. One of the more striking things has always been a focus on making storage virtualization powerful, easy to use and cost effective.

The company is launching three initiatives:

• New Offerings for Heterogeneous Disaster Recovery
• Storage Virtualization Management and
• a Deduplication Virtual Appliance Expand FalconStor’s Initiative for VMware

The company would point out that as organizations virtualize access, applications and processing, it would be wise to also include storage virtualiztion.  The benefits, the company would say, center on more cost effective management of the storage of both applications and data, creating a foundation for higher availability and disaster recovery and preparing data for easy hosting either in multiple organizational datacenters or, perhaps, in cloud storage.

Snapshot analysis

Storage virtualization is a rather crowded market that could be as large as $4 billion by the end of 2009.  All of the major major systems suppliers, storage hardware suppliers and a large number of smaller firms see an opportunity to sell products and services.

FalconStor has focused on creating applicance servers that can offer useful functions and capabilities without also requiring that their customers become storage experts. They've also done their best to allow their customers choice when it comes to the selection of the storage hardware.

Is this enough of a distinction to help the company get through all of the distractions and help IT decision makers become aware, interested and maybe desire FalconStor's products? I'm not sure that it is.

The technology is certainly worth learning about.

Unasked for shoot from the hip advice

I would suggest that it is wise for FalconStor to help organizations understand that it would be better to develop a broad virtualization architecture that includes all of the layers of virtualization technology in use today rather than becoming infatuated with the capabilities of virtual machine software alone. If people take a broad viewpoint, storage virtualization becomes a necessity not an option.