International Insurance Firm Implements FalconStor Solution

FalconStor Software, a provider of open data protection solutions, announced that a large international life insurance company has deployed FalconStor Virtual Tape Library (VTL) Enterprise Edition to optimize its backup performance across the company's open systems, IBM System i and IBM System z (mainframe) environments.

FalconStor VTL connectivity to IBM System z is enabled by FalconStor's longstanding collaboration with Bus-Tech, which plays an important role in this customer solution.

The company stated that the FalconStor VTL solution helped the insurance company bridge the gap between its mainframe and open systems, reducing IT complexity while controlling explosive data growth.

"FalconStor differentiates itself in the VTL market by offering a broader data protection platform including a strategy and product set that expands well beyond only tape emulation," said Laura DuBois, research director, IDC Storage Software. "This strategy includes deduplication, encryption and mainframe connectivity, giving FalconStor VTL wide-ranging market appeal that provides meaningful ROI in data center environments of all sizes."

"We built our leadership in the VTL market by creating the most comprehensive, high-performance solution for the broadest base of customers of any vendor in the industry. We help enterprises of all sizes address the single most critical issue in backup: meeting the backup window," said ReiJane Huai, chairman and CEO of FalconStor Software. "IDC's ROI study corroborates what we have already experienced firsthand - that our customers are solving significant data protection problems, architecting more efficient IT operations and achieving outstanding ROI with FalconStor solutions."

The international insurance firm deployed FalconStor VTL throughout its three distributed data centers. In the IBM System z environment, they installed a high-availability (HA) pair of FalconStor VTL gateway appliances with a Sun STK 6140 disk array to ensure high-speed disk-based data protection. The IT team uses the Bus-Tech Mainframe Data Library model 100V, which allows the ESCON channel to connect with the IBM z and to process mainframe tape data to the industry-standard FalconStor VTL platform. The FalconStor VTL secure tape feature exports and encrypts mainframe tapes before shipping offsite for DR and vaulting.

"Bus-Tech's Mainframe Data Library works with FalconStor VTL to provide our mainframe and distributed systems customers access to the rich feature set and benefits of FalconStor's industry-leading virtual tape library solution," said Ralph Armstrong, vice president of product management for Bus-Tech. "Companies in today's economic climate are looking at ways to reduce cost. The ability to combine mainframe and distributed systems into a single converged data protection scheme is very attractive to a wide range of data center managers."

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