FalconStor is bundling its most popular solutions offerings under a new incentive program that will help solution providers deliver more comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery solutions for customers’ VMware-based virtual server environments.

The new Virtual Protect Program, announced this week at VMware’s Partner Exchange solution provider conference, is based on FalconStor’s NSS (Network Storage Server) Gateway, says Wendy Petty, vice president of sales at FalconStor.

“We spend a great deal of time with our channel partners and VMware partners educating them on how to uncover opportunities in their customer base and identify pain points in the business continuity/disaster recovery [BC/DR] world,” Petty says.

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Many solution providers are finding that their customers are increasingly using VMware to ease backup and recovery, and FalconStor’s focus is on identifying pain points with BC/DR in general and virtualized VMware environments in particular, Petty says.

To that end, Petty says FalconStor will announce a number of specific backup and recovery solutions, including its new Virtual Protect Promotion for VMware partners. The program will bundle the NSS solution with software and storage, allowing solution providers to deliver a comprehensive virtualized BC/DR solution for customers, she says.

“What we’ve done is create a very simple bundle based on the NSS that gives channel partners everything they need to do BC/DR for a VMware environment in a single SKU,” she says.

Petty adds that the Virtual Protect promotion is the first of many similar promotions FalconStor has planned for solution providers this year. The Virtual Protect program will offer solution providers higher margins on the bundle than if solution providers sold the components separately, Petty says.

Petty says she believes solution providers will jump at the chance to offer the bundle, especially smaller partners that want a turnkey solution to offer their customers. As many organizations struggle with both virtualization and the increased need for storage a virtualized data center creates, Petty says the bundle will greatly ease solution providers and customers’ pain points.

“We’re vendor-agnostic, so it doesn’t matter what brand of storage is behind our software,” she says, making it simpler for channel partners to implement FalconStor solutions no matter what a customers’ legacy infrastructure looks like.

“Most of our partners started out as traditional storage solution providers, so it’s a natural progression for them to move toward [virtualizing] the servers and storage in a customers’ BC/DR environment,” she says.