Virtual tape library and deduplication software provider FalconStor has teamed up with Microsoft Office SharePoint management and administration software vendor Idera to help solution providers tap into the growing need for efficient storage and management of data generated by SharePoint Server.

Microsoft's SharePoint Server has seen incredible growth and adoption, says Rick Pleczko, President and CEO of Idera. In fact, Pleczko says SharePoint is Microsoft's fastest-growing product, and has generated about $1 billion dollars in a year for the software giant.

SharePoint as a collaboration platform maintains much vital business information and integrates into customers' business processes. Idera and FalconStor Software together will offer solution providers—both their own and the Microsoft partner community—an effective backup and recovery solution together with data deduplication for SharePoint applications using Idera's SharePoint backup and FalconStor's FDS (File-interface Deduplication System).

Click here to read more about FalconStor's enterprise backup offerings.

As customers use SharePoint across their organizations, the amount of data produced increases exponentially, and FalconStor and Idera's new partnership can help Microsoft solution providers more easily manage, monitor and secure all types of SharePoint-generated content for customers, Pleczko says.

"What really drove this is actually the rapid adoption of SharePoint as an enterprise content management solution, and the amount of content people are storing in SharePoint these days," says Pleczko. "Because SharePoint is so easy to deploy and manage, storage requirements for content generated are growing phenomenally." 

Pleczko says there are a number of solutions that are targeted at the exact issue, but most are just add-on functionality or adaptations of existing solutions. By partnering with FalconStor, Idera and FalconStor will be able to deliver the first real new solution aimed directly at the unique needs of SharePoint users, he says.

For the large numbers of solution providers focusing on SharePoint deployment and integration, the joint solution will better enable them to deliver a solution that includes FalconStor's deduplication technology to increase storage utilization rates, speed backup and recovery, and eliminate redundancy, combined with Idera's software to quickly and securely store all types of content, according to the companies.

Fadi Albatal, director of marketing at FalconStor, says SharePoint generates a lot of duplicate data by virtue of its integrated collaboration features, which let multiple users work on the same documents and files. This creates a situation where there could be many similar instances and different versions of files and applications, which, when backups are performed, introduces a lot of redundancy.

"Deduplication allows for the backup and storage only of the most recent, up-to-date files," Albatal says. "Solution providers and customers also benefit from the FalconStor software's replication features so they can perform business continuity/disaster recovery services for SharePoint by replicating content to a remote site," he says.