FalconStor Debuts New VTL Release

Published: February 7, 2008

by Alex Woodie

FalconStor Software last week unveiled a new release of its virtual tape library (VTL) offering, FalconStor VTL Enterprise Edition version 5. With the new VTL, FalconStor has bolstered its support for data de-duplication, a critical feature for minimizing the amount of data backed up, and added other new features.

FalconStor's VTL offerings streamline customers' backups by moving data directly to disk arrays instead of backing it up directly to tapes, which are notoriously unreliable. The company sells this capability through its flagship VTL software product, called IPStor, as well as through its VTL Enterprise Edition hardware-based offerings. All of its offerings support i5/OS and OS/400, and can emulate the majority of tape drives, autoloaders, and libraries commonly found in IT shops.

With VTL Enterprise Edition version 5, FalconStor has added several new features, and improved existing ones. For example, while the offering previously supported de-duplication, version 5 introduces a new de-duplication architecture, which FalconStor calls its single instance repository, or SIR. Version 5 introduces a new "N+1" failover architecture designed to make several VTL appliances as a single virtual appliance. If one appliance fails, the others take over for it, but they do so without compromising the benefits of de-duplication by storing unique pieces of data on each appliance. All nodes (up to 8 of them in the cluster) maintain unique de-duplication repositories, and are united by a single hash table, FalconStor says.

FalconStor VTL Enterprise Edition version 5 also introduces new features like tape shredding, tape consolidation, and multi-tape export. The new tape shredding feature ensures that the data on a virtual tape is 100 percent destroyed, and cannot be accessed, even by using disk forensics. This feature is compatible with the U.S. Department of Defense's Standard 5220.22-M, FalconStor says. The new tape consolidation feature allows users to write multiple virtual tapes to a single physical tape of greater capacity, while the multi-tape export feature allows users to make up to five physical copies of a virtual tape for DR purposes.

FalconStor VTL Enterprise Edition version 5 is available. Appliance pricing begins at $53,000. For more information, visit www.falconstor.com.

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