Tech Alert: It’s time for Better Predictive Analytics in Software-Defined Storage Environments

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FalconStor Software experts make the case for more intelligent, heterogeneous analytics

MELVILLE, NY – November 18, 2015 — /BackupReview.info/ — Higher-end storage hardware suppliers have added a spate of customized tools for monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting the health, performance, and utilization of their products to benefit customers. The business insights offered by these predictive analytics features – such as those by Pure, Nimble and Tintri – give IT professionals the ability to make proactive decisions about those specific systems within the infrastructure. Yet according to experts at FalconStor Software® Inc. (NASDAQ: FALC), a 15-year innovator of software-defined storage solutions, these tools are insufficient for today’s data centers that combine legacy, modern and virtual environments.

Software-Defined Storage (SDS) solutions are able to integrate legacy infrastructure and processes with modern and commodity storage, including all-flash arrays, hybrid flash, and HDD arrays, by applying unified data services. These SDS environments of multi-vendor storage platforms and protocols will increasingly require a multi-vendor analytics engine for actionable information about arrays, servers, and application layers. Analytics across  workloads and  the entire storage infrastructure is what will deliver the most value to an IT organization. While this would have been an impossibility just a few years ago, today’s advancements in cloud and distributed computing are making it a reality.

Intelligent, heterogeneous, predictive analytics tools provide real-time and historical data points on all components and adjust functions like performance, capacity usage, cache size, security, optimization, uptime and service levels. They also identify trends or patterns to forecast future requirements, detect problems before they result in failures or downtime, and most importantly convert that insight into policy-based actions like changing IO paths, storage tiers, or DR strategies.

“The ability of predictive analytics tools to work with software-defined storage architectures opens up a world of more important business possibilities than what storage vendors currently offer – if they offer any at all,” said Farid Yavari, Vice President of Technology at FalconStor. “A truly heterogeneous, multi-vendor tool on a single pane of glass, that can analyze an entire storage infrastructure would result in operational efficiencies, better SLA management for key workloads, and return on investment that is far superior to a single-vendor tool. With a heterogeneous multi-vendor predictive analytics tool, the entire storage ecosystem can be monitored and predictively managed from a single point of interaction. This cuts down on the complexity of the environment which is a great benefit in a hyper-scale storage implementation.”

Volume management, provisioning, and migration are often time-consuming chores, but with data mobility enabled by SDS solutions and rules-based analytics tools with automation; data and capacity can manage itself. The workload can manage its own performance requirements based on available resources, rather than going to great expense to meet a worst-case scenario.

The health and endurance of flash media can be monitored so that data can be replicated to private cloud storage before any failure or data loss occurs.

When an analytics tool is remote and cloud-based, it can also extend its benefits to service providers managing their customers’ data and infrastructures, even if secure multi-tenancy is required. With desktop and mobile interfaces, IT personnel can monitor the health of their data center from any location.

“Adding analytics to SDS is moving beyond traditional data services – it’s about giving IT organizations the insight and tools to manage storage from a proactive business perspective versus a reactive technical perspective, and it enables IT organizations to allocate engineering and operations resources in a more cost effective manner,” said Yavari.

Under FalconStor’s exclusive licensing and joint development agreement with Cumulus Logic, by early 2016, FalconStor’s FreeStor^® software will include this intelligent, predictive analytics capability that works horizontally across the entire heterogeneous storage environment.

About FalconStor
FalconStor ^® Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: FALC) is a leading software-defined storage company offering a converged data services software platform that is hardware agnostic.  Our open, integrated flagship solution FreeStor™ reduces vendor lock-in and gives enterprises the freedom to choose the applications and hardware components that make the best sense for their business.  We empower organizations to modernize their data center with the right performance, in the right location, all while protecting existing investments.  FalconStor’s mission is to maximize data availability and system uptime to ensure nonstop business productivity while simplifying data management to reduce operational costs.  Our award-winning solutions are available and supported worldwide by OEMs as well as leading service providers, system integrators, resellers and FalconStor.  The company is headquartered in Melville, N.Y. with offices throughout Europe and the Asia Pacific region. For more information, visit www.falconstor.com or call 1-866-NOW-FALC (866-669-3252).

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FalconStor, FalconStor Software, FreeStor, and Intelligent Abstraction are trademarks or registered trademarks of FalconStor Software, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All other company and product names contained herein may be trademarks of their respective holders.

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Source: FalconStor

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