HyperTrac™ Backup Accelerator for VMware Consolidated Backup offloads backups from the production environment

Cannes, France, 25th February 2009—FalconStor Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: FALC), the provider of TOTALLY Open™ data protection solutions, today introduced HyperTrac™ Backup Accelerator for VMware Consolidated Backup, a backup enhancement option for VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB).  HyperTrac technology for VMware environments integrates with FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS), a feature-rich open storage virtualisation and provisioning platform that provides a full range of data protection and DR solutions for the VMware platform.

The FalconStor HyperTrac technology for VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) further extends FalconStor NSS services to VMware Infrastructure by optimising VCB backups in order to minimise impact on virtual machines and the storage servicing those environments.  The no-impact backups enabled by FalconStor HyperTrac technology for VCB provides high performance backup for virtual machines, eliminating the disruption of backup windows required by traditional backup solutions for physical environments.

“VMware continues to work closely with FalconStor to extend the value of VMware Infrastructure and bring innovative storage virtualisation and data protection solutions to our customers,” said Parag Patel, vice president, alliances, VMware. “FalconStor’s HyperTrac Backup Accelerator for VMware Consolidated Backup enables VMware and FalconStor to provide customers with simplified, integrated, and optimised backup solutions.”

“Server virtualisation brings tremendous benefits to the data centre – server consolidation, greater server utilisation, and on-demand server deployment – but it calls for a new way to implement backup that innovative third-party solutions can provide,” said Dave Russell, research vice president, storage technologies and strategies, at Gartner.  “The method of offloading backup processes from the virtualised production server is one way that helps; setting up a simple backup environment in parallel to production servers removes the burden from the production environment and allows it to maintain optimal virtual server performance.”

VMware Consolidated Backup uses virtual machine snapshots to enable hot backup of running virtual machines, which requires processing by the VMware ESX host to maintain snapshots during the backup process and commit changes that occurred during the backup to the virtual machines after the backup from the snapshot is complete. To optimise this process, HyperTrac Backup Accelerator for VMware Consolidated Backup, which installs on any server with VCB, creates standby virtual machines on a separate VMware ESX host dedicated to backup processes.  HyperTrac then uses FalconStor thin snapshots to present VMware snapshots as the source data for VCB backup processes. 

In this way, FalconStor HyperTrac for VMware Consolidated Backup optimises backup processes by separating them from the production environment in order to help ensure maximum consolidation and scalability for larger VMware Infrastructure environments.

“We believe FalconStor HyperTrac Backup Accelerator for VMware Consolidated Backup can bring a great deal of help to customers deploying VMware Consolidated Backup,” said Bernie Wu, vice president of business development for FalconStor Software. “With HyperTrac technology for the VMware platform, the ESX snapshot workloads of virtual machines are separated from the production environment to enable maximum efficiency.  ”

FalconStor provides a full range of data protection and DR solutions for VMware environments; those solutions and integration tools include:

•   FalconStor VTL Virtual Appliance
•   FalconStor CDP Virtual Appliance
•   FalconStor NSS Virtual Appliance
•   FalconStor Application Snapshot Director (ASD) for VMware Infrastructure
•   FalconStor Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) for VMware Site Recovery Manager
•   FalconStor HyperTrac Backup Accelerator for VMware Consolidated Backup