FalconStor RecoverTrac: By any other name

FalconStor recently went to the effort of creating a name for a feature of their Continuous Data Protector (CDP) product and then went to the effort of issuing a press release and then went about the business of briefing analysts. The feature is now called "RecoverTrac™ 2.0 technology." The goal of FalconStor is to highlight their "service-oriented data protection" vision.

What FalconStor has to say about RecoverTrac

The RecoverTrac tool is the first DR automation solution to bring service-oriented recovery to both physical and virtual server infrastructures.  The RecoverTrac feature automates complex, time-consuming and error-prone failover and failback operations of systems, applications, services and entire datacenters, making FalconStor CDP the most comprehensive disk-based data protection system for backup and DR available.

Most DR solutions focus on replicating data to a remote DR site, leaving IT staff with the complex task of reconstituting servers, applications, network configurations and replicated data into a functional set of data center services for business continuity.  The RecoverTrac tool not only replicates data, but stages the recovery of complete services – thus facilitating service-oriented data protection (SODP) – by fully automating the resumption of servers, storage, networks and applications in a pre-determined, coordinated process.  The RecoverTrac solution works with all operating systems, virtual machines and networks; and it supports physical-to-physical, physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual recovery operations.

In addition to its primary recovery mode, the RecoverTrac technology offers a test mode and cloning capability. Test mode allows every aspect of the recovery process to be executed without impact on production systems.  Cloning capability allows a copy of application data to be used for other business purposes.

RecoverTrac is available immediately as a standard feature of FalconStor CDP and FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS) at no additional cost.

Snapshot analysis

What's new? Well, it appears that the name of the feature, not the feature itself is what is new. It seems that this exercise is very much like an automobile manufacturer deciding that it needed media attention, decided to give the automatic transmission in its vehicles a name, such as ShiftMaster or some such.

While I suppose that I'm rewarding this move by posting here, I thought you'd also find it interesting that a supplier would go to this effort to get attention. While FalconStor's products are powerful and have a lot to recommend them, I'm not convinced this marketing move was a good thing for the company.

I felt that it was quite a stretch to schedule a meeting to talk about this feature, a feature that has been part of CDP for a while.  Next time, I'll be much more reluctant to talk with FalconStor about a product launch.

Note:

Fadi Albatal, FalconStor's VP of Marketing, contacted me and believes that I have several inaccurate statements in the above post.  I've asked him to provide a few more details. As soon as we have had a chance to communicate, I'll post his comments here.

Here are Fadi's comments:

First, RecoverTrac is a independent DR automation tool that works with both FalconStor CDP and FalconStor NSS and is not related to CDP and NSS code releases. We offer it to our CDP and NSS customers at no additional cost which makes it look like an integrated feature of the product but we are introducing additional value to our customers that have DR projects.

Second, RecoverTrac 1.0 was introduced in November 2009 and it introduced some elements of DR automation where the customer needed to still do a lot of scripting. RecoverTrac 2.0 introduces some major enhancements, including scripting automation, service definition, a fully revised wizard driven interface and the ability to do physical to virtual conversion for full physical to virtual auto recovery.

You can think of RecoverTrac as a Global DR automation tool for physical and virtual environments, similar to VMware SRM but that span across infrastructure boundaries.

Thanks for setting me straight!