FalconStor StorSafe Enhanced Cloud-Based Data Protection Solution With Expansion of Capabilities, Ecosystem and Channel

FalconStor Software announced a series of developments to its StorSafe solution for a secure and cost-effective way for enterprises to harness the cloud for backup and long-term archival.

Launched in early 2020, StorSafe is designed to drop into an enterprise’s existing backup and archive environment as a universal backup target without requiring extensive technology or operational changes to slash the cost and complexity, increase speed of recovery, and get to the cloud. It enables organizations to adopt the cloud for data protection with confidence, thanks to its track record and novel use of container technology to package, secure and transport data, giving users the data resiliency they need and the flexibility to choose their preferred cloud providers, hardware vendors and backup software.

“Enterprises on average have 1PB of active backup data and 3PB of archive data and typically experience growth rates nearing 40% annually,” said Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “FalconStor StorSafe’s ability to accelerate the active backup and recovery process, as well as the archive to the cloud, secondary disk systems and to tape make a strong case for enterprises struggling with traditional backup architectures and looking to leverage the cloud.“

To meet these large and growing needs, the company took a number of steps throughout 2020 to expand StorSafe’s capabilities and ecosystem to make long-term, cloud-based archival the standard for the enterprise.

Some of improvements include:

• Data security and integrity: StorSafe added key management capabilities to complement its usage of AES-256 encryption of Secure Data Containers to increase the control of administrators over their archives’ security. Embedded hashes and checksums also help fight vs. data corruption and misuse, as well as periodically check data health and readiness for recovery, without the cost and manual tasks others require.

• Cloud ecosystem: StorSafe launched with support for AWS S3 service tier. It counts AWS Glacier and Deep Glacier support to lower the cost of archives, and added Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Wasabi cloud services to the roster of public cloud options.

• Object storage ecosystem: StorSafe supports cloud object storage providers including Hitachi Vantara, IBM and Dell EMC. Typical the firm’s customers use all-flash SAN storage for their first copy of data, so the ability to offload to object storage enables organizations to scale their archives as data grows and to do so at lower cost of high performance systems.

• Multi-tenancy: The product added multi-tenancy with capacity tracking and bill back capabilities, enabling enterprise IT groups and managed services providers to serve different applications, departments, tenants and customers at scale within a shared, secure environment.

• Automation with visibility and control: It enables enterprises to set retention policies to govern where data resides for any given period, and the software automates data export to the cloud, tape or secondary sites, lowering administration headaches while providing a complete view of all data and the analytics needed to maintain full system health.

• Backup software ecosystem: IT added support for the latest releases from Veeam, Veritas NetBackup, CommVault, IBM BRMS and others, covering the major players in the enterprise market.

• IBM technology: The company also expanded its support for IBMi Power Systems technology and announced support and migration services for IBM ProtecTier product.

• System health reviews: Firm‘s customer success group also released a free 30 point health check initiative to ensure the readiness of their VTL environment should an adverse event occur and identify actions to increase data security and operational efficiency.

Enterprise customers, MSPs and channel partners welcomed the expanded set of capabilities designed to modernize and slash the cost of backup and recovery operations.

Gene Uhl, network manager, City of Huntsville, Alabama, USA, said: “Like most municipalities, the IT Department of the City of Huntsville is being asked to do more with less. Transform applications to provide better service to our citizens and handle an ever-growing amount of data without an increase in budget. We turned to FalconStor to help us slash the cost of backup and archival and have achieved material savings. We like the direction the company is going to enable cloud-based data archival so that we can continue to lower our cost of service.“

Zoreena Abas, president, GDL Solutions, an Ontario, Canada-based solution provider, said: “GDL sees great opportunity in the direction that FalconStor is taking with StorSafe, augmenting its proven on-premises technology with a compelling bridge to the public cloud for backup and archival. This is the direction our customers are heading and FalconStor allows them to dramatically reduce costs immediately and transition to the cloud at their pace, making it an easy step for them and a solid business opportunity for my company.“

Fabio Biancotto, ICT director, Air Dolomiti, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lufthansa, said: “As an airline, we have a multitude of requirements that need the highest levels of security, BC, backup and DR with very short RPO and RTO. FalconStor helps make the entire infrastructure of our datacenter completely virtual, virtualizing the SAN and ensuring the continuous availability of data to production, both in the event of hardware failures and scheduled maintenance or migration to new hardware. In fact, during our 11 years using Falconstor technologies, every update or migration activity has always been carried out in operational continuity with thousands of snapshot-based recovery points and entire almost immediate time. We are very satisfied with the FalconStor solution and their direction forward.“

Adrian Rast, head, IT infrastructure, University of Zurich, Switzerland’s largest educational institution, said: “Backup and archival in education is key, especially with the online resources that we have to use today vs. physical classes. However, budgets are tighter. We need a vendor that understands the space and the challenges that we deal in both on premise and in the cloud. Thanks to FalconStor, we have been providing a reliable operation for years for VTL as-a-service to our institutes so we are able to focus on other areas and activities in IT and know that our data is still here and it is healthy.“

Darren Phillips, MD, Insurgo, UK’s tape media expert company, said: “Since our business is totally focused on helping customers manage their tape-based data, we regularly field enquiries about moving this data to the public cloud. With StorSafe, FalconStor has addressed the issues we saw as being roadblocks in the journey towards data protection modernization. Our first project involved migrating petabytes of data to one of the big public cloud players and the lessons we learned from this convinced us we had to be a FalconStor partner.”

Chris Smith, director, sales, Blue Chip, UK MSP, said: “We have been a customer and partner with Falconstor for nearly a decade and during that time, they have been part of our growth story, helping us protect our customers’ data both onsite and replicating to the Blue Chip private cloud environment. We manage more than 300 customers and 70 PB of raw data with the FalconStor solution. We see the evolution to Storsafe as a great fit for the changing needs of our customers’ data protection requirements and comes at a perfect time as Blu Chip merges with Service Express in the US, giving us a more global reach.“

Enrico Boselli, director, technology, Elmec Informatica S.p.A., Forbes top 50 international leader in digital transformation, said: “In backup and archive operations, our customers want the flexibility to choose their own on-premise hardware and Elmec’s Managed Backup Services, as well as the ability to modernize their approach, keeping or eliminating tape altogether, on their timetable. FalconStor’s StorSafe software-driven approach, rest-API integration capabilities and container technology addresses their needs and allows us to utilize our existing hardware and Elmec MSP Portfolio Services to compose a solution that can evolve with their needs. Elmec’s Managed Backup Services has the ability to support hybrid cloud backups in Elmec Datacenter, AWS, Azure or on-premises.“

Walter Borgia, CEO, Lake Solutions AG, Swiss information and communications technology provider, said: “We are pleased that FalconStor is here to support us, providing secure multi-tenant solutions that allow us to offer high-speed backup and restore, global data de-dupe, enterprise-wide replication, and long-term cloud-based container archive as a service to our customers.“

Massimo Della Vedova, owner, NT Nuove Tecnologie SRL, Italian technology reseller, said: “Falconstor is an ecosystem of applications dedicated to data management, ranging from SAN virtualization, DR automation and de-dupe, to the management of long term archives distributed on multi cloud and to the VTL for backup. All is managed with a simplified, subscription-based, all-inclusive licensing model enabled by a modern, centralized and multi-tenant system. It is a low-cost solution, supported by a timely 24x7x365 service, which allows us to provide a single, secure and stable platform with advanced BC features to our enterprise customers and our portfolio of managed services.“

“Here at Maleva, a reseller of FalconStor since 2006, we can say that FalconStor’s virtual tape technology is unbeatable,” stated Michele Pozza, GM, Maleva srl, Italian reseller specializing in data protection solutions. “The company’s powerful tape caching and ability to export the virtual cartridges in the background to the corresponding physical ones. Tape caching allows to extend more than 10 times the capacity of the disk and it’s a formidable solution for low duplicable data and for long-term protection. The ability to support failover nodes in active-active mode guarantees that data protection services are always on.“

The company‘s dedicated community of customers, channel and technology alliance partners embraced the vision and were critical in providing requirements and prioritizing these essential developments.

“2020 was not easy for any of us, and the year put enterprise IT organizations and technology providers alike under even greater pressure,” said Mark Delsman, head, engineering and product, FalconStor. “Despite it all, their close collaboration helped us to understand their use cases and specific requirements to bring StorSafe to an entirely new level. We want to thank all of our customers and partners for their counsel and support and we are glad to see them taking advantage of our latest developments to capitalize on the cloud.“