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Meeting Backup Windows Without Breaking the Bank

By Caroline Jacquet posted 09-10-2019 18:03

  

An Interview with David Morris, VP of Product Strategy & Marketing for FalconStor

David, can you give us a brief overview of FalconStor's Virtual Tape Library (VTL)?

Certainly! FalconStor’s Virtual Tape Library (VTL) is our innovative, robust backup and archive orchestration solution. It enables disk backup with tape-like operations and delivers the convenience of file-based targets founded on common native file-sharing protocols. Furthermore, we feel that disk backup targets with both file and VTL interfaces can and will play an important role in current and future data protection strategies.


How do you feel organizations treat data protection? Do you think there’s room for improvement?

Data protection is one of the most important and crucial responsibilities in any successful organization. However, the often-understated risk of data loss versus the need for and cost-effectiveness of necessary improvements is a challenging issue for senior IT decision-makers in an era of ever-tightening budgets. In hindsight, the real impact of data loss often offsets any incremental budgetary cost savings. If compliance or regulatory data is lost, it can result in significant fines, and it can be a material adverse event to the business.
Unfortunately, many IT leaders rationalize away the risk and convince themselves that their current data protection methods are adequate. There is significant room for data protection improvements in most organizations due to the complexity and ever-growing volume of data needing protection. According to Evaluator Group’s research, not only do many organizations continue to utilize fragile physical tapes, but almost a third plan to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. This strategy underutilizes new, cost-effective cloud offerings, which enable big data protection improvements. Without improvements to backup and archive processes, infrastructure, and tools, many organizations can become vulnerable to data loss.


You mentioned Evaluator Group – do they do research for FalconStor?

No, Evaluator Group is an independent company that does competitive benchmarking, and they conducted a third-party evaluation of FalconStor VTL. When analyzing FalconStor VTL in their test environment, they found that:
  • FalconStor Single-node VTL delivered a nearly 40 TB/hour backup rate
  • Our price/performance is 3X to 6X better than a leading competitor
  • Our design provides data protection that scales with additional CPU and I/O channels
  • The FalconStor architecture enables independent scaling of VTL processing, storage performance, and capacity
What's special about FalconStor VTL's ability to scale?

When testing FalconStor’s VTL software, Evaluator Group found that performance scaled nearly linearly with additional resources. Our design can utilize each additional CPU core available within a system to scale performance and capacity as long as I/O connectivity was sufficient to support the data rates required. According to Evaluator Group’s findings, “FalconStor has a 2.7X better (i.e. lower) price, and 2.7X – 5.5X better price/performance.” 


That's incredible!

Absolutely. See, our main competitor delivers an appliance that bundles hardware and software, and these solutions risk complicating the upgrade process, as their appliances are only supported for a few years before a new appliance is introduced. We at FalconStor avoid this problem entirely by using a disaggregated model, providing the ability to upgrade compute, storage, connectivity, and application software independently. This makes it possible to align costs with requirements, adding capabilities when needed rather than by default as dictated by a vendor. Together with FalconStor’s software licensing, we enable companies to upgrade resources when their business requires it.

FalconStor is a Silver sponsor at Hitachi NEXT 2019 in Las Vegas from October 8-10, 2019. We look forward to meeting you there!



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