FalconStor Software, Inc.: The Intelligent Data Management Company

“Co-founded in 2000 in New York by two Cheyenne Software veterans ReiJane Huai and Wayne Lam along with several additional former employees, FalconStor delivers the industry’s first software-based Virtual Tape Library to provide better and more performant data backup solutions.”

There are multiple drivers pushing IT organizations to extending the life of existing storage assets and future-proofing the storage infrastructure to absorb new technologies. With the commoditization of traditional and shared storage, organizations are increasingly looking for ways to avoid hardware lock-in from storage manufacturers and lower hardware costs. Further, the complexity added by different tools, interfaces and lack of interoperability across storage platforms is driving a push to enable heterogeneous storage management, data services and automating frequent or complex storage operations. Based out of Melville, New York, USA, with offices throughout Europe and the Asia Pacific region, FalconStor Software, Inc. is a leading software-defined storage company offering a converged data services software platform that is hardware agnostic.

A Horizontal, Heterogeneous Software Defined Storage Platform
The company’s flagship platform FreeStor® is the industry’s most comprehensive software-defined storage platform that gives customers the power to seamlessly migrate, recover, protect, and deduplicate data – on or off the cloud – without tying their business to specific hardware, networks, or protocols. “Our mission is to help IT organizations realize more economic value out of existing environments and any future storage investments while reducing complexity, maximizing flexibility and improving operational efficiency,” said Gary Quinn. “We are not focused on TCO like most other storage vendors but rather focused on how we can enable IT organizations and MSP get a better ROI from their storage infrastructure. We want to be a strategic business partner, not just a technology partner,” added Gary.

FreeStor® creates an Intelligent Abstraction® pool by virtualizing all or portions of underlying block storage platforms, all with a single pane of glass interface regardless of vendor or location. Users can apply a variety of data services to address their needs and use cases; Migration, continuously available clusters (2 and 4 nodes across heterogeneous arrays, locally or in stretch configuration) ensures that applications font go down. Both synchronous and asynchronous replications are available as is protection via instantly mountable and bootable snapshots. Recovery from physical to different physical, physical to virtual and virtual to virtual is available “on-the-fly” to enable recovery in minutes, not hours or days. Optimized capacity utilization through storage virtualization and deduplication across the entire storage pool are also available. New analytics ensure that users can track trends and predict capacity utilization for better forecasting and management.

Rethinking How Data is Managed FalconStor has been innovating and delivering storage solutions for more than 16 years. The key differentiating factors that set the company apart from its competitors are:

• Predictive analytics on capacity, performance (IOPS, Latency, Bandwidth), pro-active and re-active, user defined smart rules and intuitive GUI from FalconStor empower the Enterprise customer looking to become an Internal Service Provider or a Managed Service Provider looking for an economic edge to:
• The company has the unique ability to proactively and reactively manage and monitor the entire data path from the client to the virtual LUN to the Storage Pool down to the Physical storage from a single=pane –of glass regardless of location for array vendor.
• With FreeStor®, the company offers the industry’s most comprehensive SDS platform available on the market today. No other vendor integrates the breadth of unified data services with the heterogeneous analytics across the entire storage infrastructure, all managed, and monitored through a single pane-of-glass.

• Improve service level objectives
• Improve economic costs of services for customers
• Enable new service revenue streams
• Improve personnel productivity

• The ability to reduce complexity, significantly simplify day to day tasks, lower the cost of ownership and enable IT staff to have a faster time to deployment, production and revenue turns FalconStor into a strategic business partner, not a just another technology vendor.

Astutely Addressing Industry Pain Points
FalconStor addresses numerous pain points seen in the industry today. They are as briefly described below:

• Exploding Data – Data is multiplying by the second as arrays from different manufacturers have a wide range of environmental requirements, technical limitations and capabilities, combined with rapid storage technology shifts.
• Cloud Impact on IT – There are dizzying choices of deployment options when it comes to cloud hosting such as public/private/hybrid/hosted clouds.
• Outdated Buying Models such as Vendor “lock in” to proprietary storage technologies, tools, training, maintenance and refresh cycles.
• Storage Silos – Flash, Hyperconverged, the cloud and disk systems are all in place and do not talk to each other. All need to be managed separately and that creates a very complex and time consuming environment that is inefficient.

Awards & Recognitions

• FalconStor was listed at #5 in the Forbes 2008 list of 25 fastest growing technology companies.
• In 2011, CRN added FalconStor to their List of 25 “Need to Know: Storage Vendors”.
• Since the launch of FreeStor in May, 2015, the company has won 6 Product of the year awards across the US, EMEA and Asia.
• As of April, 2016, 23% of Forbes Global 500 rely on FalconStor every day.

Client Verticals
FalconStor gets traction in a number of verticals. The Managed Service Provider (MSP/Cloud Service Provider (CPS) markets are a natural fit. Verticals like Financial, Banking and Healthcare that have a lot of regulatory/compliance requirements to keep and protect data are also natural fits, as well as medium to large Enterprise IT organizations. The company also has a lot of traction in transportation, retail and state/local government verticals. FalconStor has 3000+ customers in 50 countries. Some of its big clients are Sunrise Communications, LG CNS, CHS and NASA to name a few.

Case Studies

Sunrise Communications Group AG
Sunrise Communications Group AG is the largest private telecommunications provider in Switzerland, offering a full range of services across all market segments.

The Challenge – Overcoming an outdated pricing model with escalating software costs tied to hardware refreshes needed to ensure ongoing IT environment optimization.

The Solution – FreeStor’s powerful data services platform allows Sunrise to move, store, protect and manage data in a pay-for-what-is- used flexible pricing model. “Once we implemented FreeStor, we went to a new model where we pay for what we actually use. This pricing model allows us to be more flexible. Hardware is pretty much a commodity for us now. We’ve taken features from the storage array and put them into the FreeStor virtualization array, allowing us to be more flexible. That’s pretty much the key thing – it’s about optimizing at the software level. Being able to optimize at that software level with FreeStor has actually saved us a lot of money and will continue to save us a lot of money into the future,” said Sandor Orban, Technical Infrastructure Services at Sunrise.

Egenera Xterity Cloud Services
Egenera enables organizations to deliver cost-effective, flexible yet highly reliable IT and cloud services.

The Challenge – Providing a solution that can provide both disaster recovery and backup services for both physical and virtual cloud storage environments.

The Solution – Egenera implemented FreeStor which became the most-requested add-on solution for Xterity’s cloud platform, providing a market differentiator for customer portfolios. The use of FreeStor’s backup and disaster recovery capabilities are providing market differentiation for Egenera as it delivers revenue generating services for key partners, including managed service providers (MSPs), and independent software vendors (ISVs). The FreeStor technology easily enables the company to provide managed backup BaaS and disaster recovery (DRaaS) services with a range of RPO and RTO packages. This enables Xterity customers to satisfy requirements from a number of hours down to just a few minutes. Storage optimization benefits also ensure profitability by protecting margins. FreeStor is currently being used as part of Egenera’s Xterity offerings on all of the company’s clouds in Europe and the United States, and will be implemented as part of its first Asian cloud launching later this year.

Imptech SA
Imptech implements service virtualization, and provides services for data center migration and consolidation. It also offers tools for the upgrades of hardware, operating systems and applications.

The Challenge – Expanding Imptech’s portfolio of technologies with a data recovery and replication solution that provides needed availability, protection and flexibility.

The Solution – FreeStor’s powerful data services platform allows Imptech to deliver flexible solutions to meet customers’ business-critical requirements to move, store, protect and manage data. FreeStor ensures Imptech is well-positioned to help their customers overcome their unique data challenges while providing the right mix of performance and flexibility appropriate for any industry. With its comprehensive set of unified data services, FreeStor provides Imptech with the ability to manage its customers’ data with greater simplicity, tighter control, maximum efficiencies and lower costs while allowing the Imptech team to standardize critical data protection on a single solution platform for their key industry customers.

Meet the CEO – Gary Quinn

Gary is FalconStor’s President and Chief Executive Officer. He joined FalconStor in April 2012 as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for North America. In April 2013, Gary was named Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (COO). With more than 20 years at CA Technologies, he last served as Executive Vice President of International Sales and North American Channel Sales. In his executive sales role at CA, Quinn turned around a three-year decline of the company’s North American channel business to an annual growth rate of 25 percent. He has more than 15 years of executive experience in the rapidly evolving field of technology, specifically within the partner community, assisting in generating revenue streams and strengthening relationships. Most recently, Gary was the commissioner of information technology (CIO) at Suffolk County Department of Information Technology. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Hofstra University.

“We have great pride in our rich history of technological innovation. This spirit is pervasive and drives us to develop better, more flexible, and more efficient solutions that address increasingly complex data management needs today and well into the future.”

Client Feedback

“…with FreeStor we are able to offer a converged storage ecosystem with a full suite of services. This is how Telefonica can help companies become intelligent enterprises, with collaborative tools that boost the creativity of employees through talent empowerment.” – Luis Urzua, Digital Solutions Manager, Telefonica Empresas

The FreeStor platform provides our customers with an intelligent and flexible technology layer that enables common, efficient, and cost-effective storage services and centralized management of storage resources across an organization.” – Gabriel Enzo Gagliardi, CEO, Imptech

“FreeStor helps us to provide infrastructure services that support our business to provide the highest levels of availability and data security. It allows us to support the business by driving faster and lower-cost launches of new products and services.” – Sandor Orban, Technical Lead Infrastructure Services, Sunrise Communications Ag

“When you have something complex, it will be frustrating to use when you need it. What might take days to restore a couple of terabytes of data on our old storage would only take a couple of minutes to restore with FreeStor®. I think FreeStor is the right way to go.” – Athanasios Vacopoulos, Owner, C&C Computação E Comunicação

“Our goal is to deliver enterprise-class software-defined, intelligent data services combined with predictive analytics across any primary or secondary storage hardware; in the cloud or on-premise.”