Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Thursday, March 28, 2024

FalconStor Introduces FreeStor 

FalconStor Software Inc. today introduced the first truly horizontal, software-defined storage platform for unified data services – FreeStor.

FreeStor is a milestone product for FalconStor and an industry first, in bringing a horizontal data services approach to modernizing the enterprise. While virtualization has streamlined some common tasks associated with managing data resources, the introduction of a virtualization layer brings a whole new level of complexity to the protection, recovery and integration of both virtual and non-virtualized resources. FreeStor’s unified platform provides migration, continuity, protection, recovery and optimization for any storage environment through a single management interface – all for a single price based on managed capacity across arrays, servers, hypervisors, data centers, and the cloud.

FalconStor accomplishes this through the introduction of its Intelligent Abstraction core, which provides a massively scalable storage hypervisor, coupled with a data services engine and automation, to ease the provisioning and management of storage resources with the right level of performance, protection and recovery.  The Intelligent Abstraction core optimizes storage resources regardless of type, connectivity, brand or speed into a storage resource pool that can be provisioned to physical or virtual applications, along with common, unified data services across that pool.  FreeStor eliminates the complexity and incompatibilities of point solutions along with the time involved in managing disparate underlying storage found in today’s enterprise.

FalconStor’s FreeStor is a breakthrough software platform that provides immense value to organizations in their storage environments today, while allowing them to embrace and integrate new technologies and capabilities, including flash at the pace their business and budgets allow. Data can be moved without disruption from any location to any location, and management is centralized for simplicity and ease of use.

“IT organizations must deal with data services such as migration, continuity, recovery, efficiency and optimization with a vertical integration view – each aspect being something to stack on one another – which tends to add layers of complexity as well,” said Phil Goodwin, Research Director at IDC. “FalconStor, with its Intelligent Abstraction core, is aiming to simplify data services by horizontally integrating each of these into a single, converged platform that allows storage administrators to use the services and capacity they need when they need it. Simplicity and agility are foremost needs of IT managers. The FreeStor platform is designed to allow companies to simplify data migration, recovery, protection and deduplication without tying their business to specific hardware, networks or protocols.”

FreeStor delivers immediate business value to companies, such as:

• Simplifying the on ramp to, from and across the cloud – FreeStor’s converged data management services provide an efficient way to move, synchronize and protect data between organizations’ current on premise IT infrastructures and private, hosted or hybrid clouds

• Modernize legacy infrastructure without rip and replace – new, simple cost-effective tools work seamlessly on and across most platforms and data types while leveraging and modernizing existing hardware to further help organizations break the chains of restrictive vendor lock-in, vendor specific tools, and vendor-dictated business models

• Always-on business continuity – improved, enhanced local, active-active or multi-site high availability ensures files, applications, systems and even entire sites are consistently available • Predictable, simple, flexible pricing with no surprises - all data management services are provided in an annual subscription-based price-per-terabyte model with 24 x 7 support and software upgrades

FreeStor features centralized management with monitoring, reporting and configuration available via a branded management GUI with enhanced REST API.  Enhanced performance provides more than one million IOPs per IO cluster using SSD-based storage and has upward scalability.  FreeStor’s increased deduplication and backup efficiencies improve storage utilization, reducing a company’s storage footprint, and WAN optimized replication and data movement can reduce costs by as much as 95 percent.

“With the amount of data captured and stored in today’s disparate infrastructures, simplifying data management is more crucial now than ever,” said Gary Quinn, President and Chief Executive Officer, FalconStor. “With old storage technology ineffective for today’s enterprises and storage options that are inadequate for today’s data itself, we are pleased to offer breakthrough technology inspired by the advancement of our Intelligent Abstraction core.  Organizations are now free to do business in a way that makes the most sense by allowing them to choose the right storage infrastructure to match their business, operations and budget.  With our 15 years of providing field hardened virtualization, protection and migration technologies, we are able to bring to market the first true horizontal software-defined storage platform that converges and unifies data management services with predictable pricing and performance.”

EnterpriseAI