FalconStor

FalconStor's product marketing manager, Peter Eicher, and I had a chat recently about Hyper-V, storage virtualization, life and the universe recently. The news is that FalconStor is supporting Microsoft's Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Multi-Site Clustering and Microsoft Hyper-V Virtual Servers. FalconStor' NSS enables automated, application-consistent failover in geographically dispersed clusters of both physical and Hyper-V virtual servers for better disaster recovery over the WAN.

Although this seems obvious, it is surprising how often I learn of people who have embarked on the journey to a more virtualized environment and haven't really explored storage virtualization and its impact on higher availability and disaster recovery plans. What good is it if a virtual server is able to move to a back up site and operate there during a problem when it can't get to the data it was processing?

FalconStor's secret sauce is the level of granularity of its replication technology. Rather than sending a whole track or a group of sectors, FalconStor's product can send a much smaller unit of data that larely consists only of what's changed. The company has some impressive statistics on how replication of data from Microsoft's Exchange or SQLserver is accelerated using their technology. I've heard similar stories from a number of other storage virtualization software suppliers as well.

The bottom line is that a well designed virtualization strategy includes a balanced portfolio of virtualization technologies that include access, application, processing, storage and network virtualization.