Nexsan, FalconStor Prep Fast, Green Backup

Late next month, Nexsan Technologies will ship a new line of data protection and disaster recovery appliances bundled with deduplication software from FalconStor Software.

The Nexsan DeDupe SG (Speed with Green) 2.0 with the new version of FalconStor’s File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) 2.0 is targeted at data protection and disaster recovery applications that require high-performance deduplication, says Bob Woolery, SVP, Marketing for Nexsan.

Featuring support for Symantec’s OpenStorage (OST) protocol, the bundle offers double the speed and double the performance of the previous generation, rolled out last August, and supports up to 1.4 petabytes of backup data. "This platform lets you go faster, lets you have greater availability and scalability."

Bundling the appliances with the new version of FDS means much more than becoming the first product to bring high availability together with new enterprise-level replication features and enhanced security, adds Fadi Albatal, vice president of product marketing for FalconStor.

"Redundant appliances provide an active-passive pair ensuring maximized storage efficiency without risking data loss," he says, unlike-point deduplication appliances that are vulnerable.

Woolery says the two ten-year-old channel companies have been successful individually, but together offer the next generation of deduplication. "We had the opportunity to deliver product to the marketplace that not only gave you the efficiency of reducing the number of disks, but also operational efficiencies."

From a green perspective, he says they can reduce energy consumption by 60 percent, which is another strong benefit for the channel. With Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0 customers not only get higher capacity and better performance during their backups, but save energy and reduce costs every hour that the system is not in use.

"Now you have a really differentiated product which is important for our channel. It allows them to engage those customers in a broader conversation."

Albatal says the appliances double the speed of backup applications up to 1.5 terabytes per hour, and also support archiving. And by integrating the two companies’ solutions, they can leverage both their channels. "It provides very high value to our channel partners because it is easy to sell, and to our customers because it is an integrated solution… so the best of both worlds."

While this partnership is expected to pay big dividends to both companies, Albatal says FalconStor’s software is available on other platforms and there will be more Nexsan-like offerings going forward. "Whether the level of partner engagement will be at the same level as Nexsan remains to be seen."

The redundant DeDupe SG 2.0 provides continuous data access and automatic backup application failover, and offers backup server connections of up to 5.4 terabytes per hour (single-stream backup performance).

Leveraging Nexsan’s AutoMAID technology for better power efficiency, disk drives are transparently placed into their most energy-efficient state without affecting backup performance. Other features include support for key backup software, including NetBackup, replication support for up to 150 remote sites and optional 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections.

With the announcement, Nexsan is adding a seventh appliance that increases the top end of the line to repository data capacity of 72 Tb, and a logical data capacity of 1440 Tb. The lineup spans from the entry-level DDSG-4 — 4 and 80Tb respectively — to the new DDSG-72.