AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID MORRIS, VP OF PRODUCT FOR FALCONSTOR
David, can you give us a brief overview of what 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.
Thanks, David. Is there anything else you’d like to tell our blog readers today?
Yes, thanks for stopping by and reading our blog today! If you’re not subscribed, we’d like to invite you to do so now. Also, you can read Evaluator Group’s test results for FalconStor VTL, “High Performance Backup in Enterprise Environments with FalconStor VTL” and watch this video. Lastly, at the top right of this page, you will find a red button to Request a Demo. We’d love to show you our solution in action, so contact us today!