Virtual Iron Teams Up with FalconStor for Full Virtualization

Published: January 15, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server virtualization and storage virtualization have been on parallel development tracks, seeking to solve similar, but distinct, problems that data centers are facing. Server virtualization is about getting processor utilization, which has been woefully low over the past two decades, up by a factor of three or four while at the same time enabling new kinds of disaster recovery and application deployment scenarios. Storage virtualization is about making it easier to provision and manage storage that is shared by multiple servers and trying to use every block of data space available on physical disks in arrays.

"Server virtualization and workload mobility is really the killer application for storage," explains Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron, which has been building out and perfecting its interpretation of server virtualization for the past several years with its eponymous tools. Virtual Iron created its own hypervisor, but in April 2006 it switched to the open source Xen hypervisor and added the kind of functionality to it that has brought VMware to its dominant position in server virtualization thus far. "But this is a really complex undertaking, and customers who do not think through the issues are going to run into troubles down the road."

That is why Virtual Iron is partnering with FalconStor, whose IPStore products are used on an OEM basis by many vendors in the storage market (including EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, MPC, and others), helping it generate approximately $75 million in sales in 2007. FalconStor was founded in Melville, New York, in 2000 and now has over 400 employees, and according to Gordon Twilegar, director of business development at the company, about three quarters of those employees are involved in product development. This is why both FalconStor and Virtual Iron are relying on channels and OEM deals to drive their sales--it leaves resources available to plow back into product research and development.

Storage is, whether people realize it or not, integral to server virtualization. (A virtual machine is just a big wonking file that describes a complete server environment.) Since October 2006, Virtual Iron has been offering a LiveMigration feature that allows virtual machines and their applications to be transported from one physical machine to another when connected by a shared storage area network. With the Virtual Iron 4.2 release put out in December 2007, the company added a LiveSnapshot feature, which can take a snapshot of a live partition and archive it; up until now, Virtual Iron could clone a software stack running on the hypervisor in a guest partition, but the software in the partition had to be quiesced before than clone could be made. That release was also updated with multipathing support for Ethernet network links and Fibre Channel storage area network links, allowing virtual machines, physical networks, and storage to be cross-coupled with multiple paths between each other, improving the resiliency of the resulting setup. The updated software also included features that allow customers to add a disk drive to a disk group and dynamically add it to an existing virtual drive.

But with the capability inherent with FalconStor's IPStor software, customers running the Virtual Iron products can do much more sophisticated storage management. FalconStor's Network Storage Server virtualizes SAN, NAS, and WORM drives over every core networking technology and network file system, plus adds compression, thin provisioning, application-aware snapshotting, and serverless backup. The company's Continuous Data Protector tool is used to journal, mirror, and snapshot applications. When customers run Virtual Iron on servers that use IPStor-based disk arrays, something very interesting can now happen--storage arrays can be migrated around a network of storage gear without impacting the running of servers. This is particularly useful for disaster recovery and migrating to new gear as equipment comes off lease.

As part of the alliance between the two companies, Virtual Iron has certified FalconStor's NSS and CDP products on its Version 4.2 products. The two companies will be working through channel partners to market and promote the mixed use of their software to make more resilient, virtualized server and storage setups. But the companies are not going so far as to create a joint bundle of their tools, and Virtual Iron has not simply licensed the FalconStor software and embedded it into the high-end of its tools--something that is technically possible but very likely economically prohibitive for Virtual Iron to do.

Before it was acquired by Citrix Systems last summer, XenSource, the other key provider of Xen-based tools for server virtualization, had partnered with Symantec to bundle Veritas storage management software with XenEnterprise to attain some of the functionality Virtual Iron is seeking through its partnership with FalconStor. VMware has pre-announced a feature called Storage VMotion to attack the storage virtualization problem, and similarly has partnerships with FalconStor, Symantec, and others with storage virtualization capabilities. According to Twilegar, FalconStor has partnered with VMware with its Network Storage Server and Continuous Data Protector, but VMware's own Virtual Infrastructure 3 stack is loaded with its own snapshotting and disaster recovery tools--which VMware certainly wants customers to pay for.

While Linux and Windows get equal airplay in terms of server virtualization these days, when it comes to servers, it is Windows boxes that companies have thus far been focusing on virtualizing on Virtual Iron, XenEnterprise, or ESX Server hypervisors. FalconStor's IPStor software runs on Linux, but the arrays that use it can support Windows, Linux, Unix, and other server platforms. However, because Windows is so prevalent in the data center these days and so inefficiently used, the storage behind Windows servers as well as a smattering of Unix storage are mostly what FalconStor's products are actually virtualizing these days.

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