I have been invited to a number of Virtualisation Field Day (sorry have to spell it the correct way) by Stephen Foskett, but for one reason or another things didn’t work out at my end. The stars have aligned and I’m pleased to say I will attending VFD 6.
Of all the companies that are presenting the only one that isn’t new to me is FalconStor, a good friend of mine used to work for them many years ago as a Pre-Sales Storage Architect, so I’m vaguely familiar with their CDP products.
What Do They Do?
FalconStor have been around for a while, founded in 2000 in New York. They have offered Network Storage Server NSS and Continuous Data Protector CDP for a number of years, so I’m making an educated guess that they won’t be speaking about these products.
Most likely it will be the product FreeStor that will be presented during Virtualisation Field Day 6. FreeStor is an abstraction layer that enables you to migrate data seamlessly between arrays, clusters or sites. Apart from the normal questions around connectivity does this mean it can move VM’s from on-premises vSphere and migrate them to consume Azure resources or is it between like minded file formats?
FreeStor is a hardware solution that provides ‘Software Defined Storage’ (this bit I don’t exactly get) which has a rather interesting topology, that requires Management Server, Storage Servers and a Dedupe Repository, I’m not entirely sure why, but I’m sure this will become clear during the presentation.
One of the key benefits around ‘Software Defined Storage’ should be the ease of implementation (couple of clicks to enable), however FreeStor requires FalconStor Professional Services to install and configure. This could be due to the fact that they want to protect the brand for a while whilst the platform matures.
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