Virtual Iron and FalconStor form virtualization alliance

FalconStor Software, specializing in disk-based data protection solutions, and Virtual Iron, provider of server virtualization software, announced the formation of a strategic alliance in order to help streamline storage and server virtualization solutions. Both companies hope to enhance IT productivity and business continuity for organizations of all sizes.

The combined solution is geared toward improving data center resource management by increasing utilization of existing physical resources, optimizing virtual infrastructure performance through real-time data migration, and delivering more cost-effective high availability and disaster recovery.

“The server virtualization market is red hot and gaining rapid adoption as organizations strive to achieve physical server consolidation, maximize resource utilization and deploy disaster recovery solutions,” said Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “In a recent survey of current and planned virtualization users, ESG discovered the importance of networked storage as 86% of the respondents that have implemented server virtualization use some form of networked storage to support their infrastructure requirements.”

Virtual Iron and FalconStor have agreed to collaborate on marketing, sales, product integration and cross-support to original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and reseller partners worldwide.

FalconStor’s Network Storage Server (NSS) and FalconStor’s Continuous Data Protector (CDP) support both iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage. For Virtual Iron customers, it provides:

• Storage Migration for Virtual Machines – Virtualization combined with built-in mirroring allows seamless migration between storage arrays without downtime.

• Extended support for a wide range of SMB and enterprise-class storage arrays already certified by FalconStor.

• Application-aware snapshot agents that provide transactionally-consistent snapshots of data for Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, SAP, and Oracle running in virtual machines.

• Thin provisioning for virtual machines maximizes disk space to optimize storage management within virtualized environments.

These capabilities allow Virtual Iron customers to take a storage-vendor agnostic approach to virtualize and provision storage resources for virtual machines. The combination also attempts to offer an answer to the market where questions are raised about competing technologies from VMware and Citrix.

VMware has had its VMotion technology for a while now and recently announced the addition of Storage VMotion to try and answer the questions around storage virtualization. And VMware is also partnered with FalconStor along with other storage virtualization vendors. In addition, VMware offers its own snapshot and disaster recovery features which provides value to customers and also helps to justify the cost of the VI3 solution.

Citrix has also partnered with others, including companies such as Symantec. The partnership allows Symantec to bundle Veritas storage management software with Citrix XenServer in order to offer some of the same functionality.

“Independently, Virtual Iron and FalconStor anticipated advanced data center applications driven by workload mobility and policy-based automation to reduce the cost and complexity of data center operations. We designed our next generation architectures accordingly,” said Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron. “Our joint customers benefit from an integrated server virtualization and storage virtualization solution that leverages existing investments and doesn’t break existing practices.”

Virtual Iron and FalconStor will host a joint Webcast on February 7th, 2008, featuring the combined capabilities. Register for this upcoming event, here.