FalconStor’s president and CEO Gary Quinn will ring the NASDAQ closing bell yesterday to celebrate the company’s 15-year anniversary. The company has simplified its market approach by launching Freestor – a product claimed as ‘the first truly horizontal, software-defined storage platform for unified data services’. You’ll want to learn more about this innovative company, which has always taken a ‘software-only’ approach to storage virtualisation and management.
Freestor combines all of the companies IP in one offering
I spoke yesterday with Guy Berlo (VP and GM of EMEA) about the company – reminding me that it’s HQ is in Long Island, with offices in Munich, London, Paris and Asia. It has been a long-term pioneer of heterogeneous storage virtualisation and management. its go-to-market approach includes some traditional OEM relationships – especially for its Virtual Tape Library (VLT) software.
Falconstor is now putting all its wood behind the single arrow of Freestor – a platform which adds a core ‘Intelligent Abstraction’ layer that provides virtualisation, data services and policy-based automation, allowing applications, data and workloads to be de-coupled from their associated hardware, networks and protocols.
It is designed to be multi-hypervisor and so has the advantage over single environment tolls sets such as VMware’s own. As with other SDS approaches Freestor can help with migration, allowing P2V, V2V and P2P movement of workloads.
Product simplification means that its 4 offerings (see Figure, where I’ve estimated their contribution to the company’s product revenues in 2014) now combined in Freestor can now be bought on their own only by their existing customers; while pricing simplification – that users will now pay $350 per Terabyte per year for the new software. it’s a similar approach to Asigra’s in the backup and recovery market and makes particular sense for a relatively small software company.
Innovation at the point of mass adoption
Sometimes it’s not what’s going to happen, but when it’ll find a market that counts. Falconstor’s announcement reminds me of the ‘storage hypervisor’ research Claus Egge, Puni Raja and I completed a few years’ ago. At the time the leading vendors were Virsto, Datacore, Falconstor and IBM’s SVC. Virsto got bought by VMware and IBM eventually launched Spectrum, but all 4 were early pioneers of what I suppose we’re all learning to cal Software Defined Storage (SDS).
In the wider storage systems market customers took longer than we expected to cut the ties to the major storage array suppliers – tending to be conservative, especially given their responsibility in looking after corporate data. The major storage system suppliers were also slower to move away from big arrays and big hardware margins. Most have now unified their own (often acquired) products under a single management schema and many have extended that management to federated storage from other vendors. To have a truly heterogeneous market however customers need to be able to buy their hardware, software and cloud offerings independently of each other. Falconstor has been enabling that for many years – its one of only a few truly ‘Software Defined’ approaches. By simplifying its offerings now it’s in an excellent position to take advantage, as the ‘late majority’ of storage users make deep changes.