FalconStor and Virtual Iron Team Up

January 11, 2008: In a bid to streamline storage and server virtualisation, FalconStor and Virtual Iron have joined forces to create a global alliance.

FalconStor supplies storage virtualisation and data protection products, while Virtual Iron provides virtual server facilities based on the open source Xen code, similar to VMware but at a fraction of the cost according to the company.

The two claim their combined solutions will improve data centre resource management by increasing utilisation of existing physical resources, optimising virtual infrastructure performance through real-time data migration, and delivering more cost-effective and reliable high availability and disaster recovery.

The alliance will enable Virtual Iron customers to tap into FalconStor’s Network Storage Server (NSS) and Continuous Data Protector (CDP) via Virtual Iron’s platform, imbuing it with unique capabilities including:

• Storage Migration for Virtual Machines
• Extended support for SMB and enterprise-class storage arrays already certified by FalconStor.
• Application-aware snapshot agents that provide transactionally-consistent snapshots of data for Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, SAP, and Oracle running in virtual machines.
• Thin provisioning for virtual machines.

The new duo claim that these capabilities enable Virtual Iron customers to take a storage-vendor agnostic approach to virtualise and provision storage resources for virtual machines.

“The combined FalconStor and Virtual Iron virtualisation capabilities fully optimise user business continuity goals by streamlining live migration of virtual machine disks from one data storage system to another,” said Bernie Wu, Vice President of Business Development at FalconStor.

“Independently, Virtual Iron and FalconStor anticipated advanced data centre applications driven by workload mobility and policy-based automation to reduce the cost and complexity of data centre operations. We designed our next generation architectures accordingly,” added Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron.

“Our joint customers benefit from an integrated server virtualisation and storage virtualisation solution that leverages existing investments and doesn't break existing practices.”

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