The heart of FalconStor's offering is its FreeStor Software Defined Storage solution , which allows companies to create their own shared storage from unmarked servers. FreeStor is the result of almost fifteen years of development, since the software is largely based on the publisher's historical storage virtualization product, FalconStor NSS (Network Storage Server), and also incorporates the firm's know-how in data reduction (deduplication) and protection (CDP).
FreeStor has historically been used in front of existing storage arrays to virtualize them. But the software can be installed on uncomplicated x86 servers with multiple hard disks and / or JBODs to provide highly available SAN storage and can also be deployed as virtual appliances on VMware ESX or OpenStack. The software includes advanced replication (synchronous and asynchronous), snapshots, disaster recovery, deduplication and thin provisioning capabilities. Recently, it has also been enriched with a set of analytical tools to optimize the use of available capacity, maximize performance or simplify the diagnosis of application problems.
According to Quinn, FreeStor is now used by both companies (such as GMF, Groupama or Printemps in France) and service providers, who deploy the solution to provide disaster recovery services to their customers.
An aggressive license mode
For the CEO of FalconStor, the main novelty of the latest version of the software is its licensing. The publisher charges 3 cents per gigabyte per month for the first copy of data managed by FreeStor. Any additional copy in the cloud or on the customer's site is free. "Our position is that our customers should only pay once for their data," said Quinn, breaking with decades of billing practices in the storage world.
In practice, this means that a company setting up a PRA infrastructure with FreeStor will only pay a license for its primary site and not for the data stored on the secondary site (it will of course continue to buy servers and the discs needed to run the software). To date, this is arguably the most aggressive pricing model on the market, as storing 10 TB of data will only cost $ 3,600 per year in the FreeStor license.
FreeStor has historically been used in front of existing storage arrays to virtualize them. But the software can be installed on uncomplicated x86 servers with multiple hard disks and / or JBODs to provide highly available SAN storage and can also be deployed as virtual appliances on VMware ESX or OpenStack. The software includes advanced replication (synchronous and asynchronous), snapshots, disaster recovery, deduplication and thin provisioning capabilities. Recently, it has also been enriched with a set of analytical tools to optimize the use of available capacity, maximize performance or simplify the diagnosis of application problems.
According to Quinn, FreeStor is now used by both companies (such as GMF, Groupama or Printemps in France) and service providers, who deploy the solution to provide disaster recovery services to their customers.
An aggressive license mode
For the CEO of FalconStor, the main novelty of the latest version of the software is its licensing. The publisher charges 3 cents per gigabyte per month for the first copy of data managed by FreeStor. Any additional copy in the cloud or on the customer's site is free. "Our position is that our customers should only pay once for their data," said Quinn, breaking with decades of billing practices in the storage world.
In practice, this means that a company setting up a PRA infrastructure with FreeStor will only pay a license for its primary site and not for the data stored on the secondary site (it will of course continue to buy servers and the discs needed to run the software). To date, this is arguably the most aggressive pricing model on the market, as storing 10 TB of data will only cost $ 3,600 per year in the FreeStor license.
For internal or public cloud deployments
In addition to aggressive pricing, Quinn has also announced support for FreeStor on most major public clouds, including Amazon AWS , Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud (Alyiun), Huawei Cloud and Oracle Cloud.- IBM Softlayer cloud support is still under development. In practice, this means that a customer can instantiate a FreeStor virtual appliance on one of these clouds and present the underlying storage as block services (iSCSI). The resulting storage can be consumed by applications already in the cloud or used as a replication target by a FreeStor "on premise" appliance for disaster recovery. The set can be administered by a single instance of the home management portal, FMS (FreeStor Management Server).
For Gary Quinn, the availability of FreeStor in the cloud is a guarantee of freedom for customers. "I'm pretty sure that Amazon will not give you a tool to migrate your storage from Amazon to Azure. That's the freedom we give you, "said the CEO of FalconStor, drawing a parallel with what FreeStor already allows" on premise "by replicating or moving data from local storage to an EMC array or from a NetApp bay to a Pure Storage bay.
The latest version of FreeStor also includes several important enhancements such as integration with LDAP and Active Directory for authentication and role management, support for NVMe disks, and the ability to analyze the end-to-end performance of an application. via the information collected by the FreeStor client agent (now deployable via Puppet).
In addition to aggressive pricing, Quinn has also announced support for FreeStor on most major public clouds, including Amazon AWS , Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud (Alyiun), Huawei Cloud and Oracle Cloud.- IBM Softlayer cloud support is still under development. In practice, this means that a customer can instantiate a FreeStor virtual appliance on one of these clouds and present the underlying storage as block services (iSCSI). The resulting storage can be consumed by applications already in the cloud or used as a replication target by a FreeStor "on premise" appliance for disaster recovery. The set can be administered by a single instance of the home management portal, FMS (FreeStor Management Server).
For Gary Quinn, the availability of FreeStor in the cloud is a guarantee of freedom for customers. "I'm pretty sure that Amazon will not give you a tool to migrate your storage from Amazon to Azure. That's the freedom we give you, "said the CEO of FalconStor, drawing a parallel with what FreeStor already allows" on premise "by replicating or moving data from local storage to an EMC array or from a NetApp bay to a Pure Storage bay.
The latest version of FreeStor also includes several important enhancements such as integration with LDAP and Active Directory for authentication and role management, support for NVMe disks, and the ability to analyze the end-to-end performance of an application. via the information collected by the FreeStor client agent (now deployable via Puppet).