John Lallier’s Blog

One of the nice things about the technology sector is that it’s never boring – there are always changes to make life interesting.  This can be a new technique that provides a better solution to a problem, or a new, disruptive technology that requires us to re-evaluate our current processes.  Or it can be as simple as a change in the marketplace.  When one of your competitors is acquired by a larger company, some people will see this as a problem.  But it can also be an opportunity.

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Like everyone else these days, I’ve been watching the economic news with a feeling of dread combined with a strong sense of outrage.  How did those idiots – and by “those idiots” I mean “them” and not “us” – screw this all up for the rest of us.  Luckily, the talking heads on the news shows all assure us things will get better – just as soon as we hit absolute rock bottom.  In the mean time, life goes on for all of those who have to keep the lights on and the IT systems running.  The only difference is that we’re now asked to do more with less, or in some cases the same with a lot less.  But all is not lost.  There are solutions that can help businesses do more without breaking the already reduced budget.

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It seems every year someone publishes a list of the top issues in IT, and every year backup issues are right up there at the top of the list.  After 20 years of working on backup products, I find it a little disconcerting that backup remains a major problem.  Maybe the problem is that we are still using the same approach we were using over 30 years ago.  We keep trying to improve the process, but it’s not enough.  Maybe it’s time to try a different tactic.

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Yes, I know what you’re thinking.  “Solid-state disks aren’t new; they’ve been around for a while.”  But so have Fibre Channel and SANs, and just like those technologies solid-state disks have been changing.  And while in the past they were only used by a few high-end systems that required their unique properties, maybe now they’re something that everyone can use.  Let’s face it – walk around the streets of any town and people are wandering around with solid-state disks hooked to their belts or strapped to their arms.  They’re called iPods or iPhones or iWhatevers – and are basically the simplest form of a solid state disk.  So every business should use them now, right?

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It’s been a while since my last post, and with summer officially over (I know most people think summer ends on Labor Day in the US, but the weathermen insist the official end is late September), it seems like a good time to look at a recent announcement.  Among the flurry of press releases at the recent VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, there was one in particular I’d like to discuss.  VMware has certified the FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS) as a storage virtualization device for use with VMware Infrastructure 3.  But the real point here isn’t that FalconStor NSS was certified, it’s that NSS isn’t a device at all – it’s software.

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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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