John Lallier’s Blog

This week FalconStor announced its support for 8Gb Fibre Channel adapters and switches from QLogic.  Along with FalconStor and QLogic, other companies such as Brocade and Emulex are also shipping 8Gb Fibre Channel adapters and switches, while array vendors like HP and IBM are planning their releases for next year.  The question is: who’s looking for faster storage?  Sure, there are always the high-end applications that will use all the horsepower available to them, but are these the majority?  Given that most application servers using 4Gb Fibre Channel storage use two ports for redundancy, that’s a maximum throughput of 1.6GB per second.  Does the average email server really need storage that operates at double that speed?  Probably not.

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When we started FalconStor so many years ago, it was with the goal of delivering a SAN over an IP network, allowing users to have a single connection for both LAN and SAN.  What we quickly learned was that people who have SANs have Fibre Channel, so we turned right around and made our flagship product IPStor also work with Fibre Channel.  And despite the rise of iSCSI, Fibre Channel remains the dominant SAN protocol in data centers today.  It’s not that iSCSI isn’t easy to use; it’s just that people are not unhappy with Fibre Channel.  But that doesn’t mean people stopped looking at using Ethernet for the SAN.  And so enters the latest solution … Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

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FalconStor recently announced our support for Symantec’s Open Storage initiative, and as a result I’ve had various people asking me why this is important.  My early answers were “Because they work together.  Now Symantec’s NetBackup and the FalconStor VTL are integrated.”  And that’s when the blank stares began, and I realized I had to give a better answer because (obviously) they worked together before.  And somehow ‘They work together BETTER’ doesn’t really improve the answer.  You have to give people the answer to the age old question – ‘What’s in it for me?’ 

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