FalconStor Software, Inc., the market leader in disk-based data protection solutions, today announced that ADS Portal, a London-based computing and IP telephony service provider, has completed deployment of FalconStor^® IPStor^® software to meet the rigorous requirements of their business continuity and disaster recovery plans. IPStor software has additionally enabled storage consolidation and the introduction of centralised storage management, improving the overall ease of management of the storage infrastructure.

Initially, ADS Portal brought in FalconStor Solution Provider, Intercept IT and FalconStor, to review and improve its storage architecture, but ended up meeting additional business continuity and disaster recovery objectives.

Gary Collins, Technical Director, ADS Portal, explains: “Being a service provider, it is paramount to our success that every aspect of our service is stable and reliable. In reviewing the options available to us in our storage disaster recovery plans, it was clear that IPStor software could provide a scalable platform that meets our current and future needs with minimal disruption.”

In the post-deployment environment, two IPStor appliances at ADS Portal’s primary centre in London replicate data to a site in Milton Keynes, 50 miles (80km) away, providing disaster recovery capabilities in case of a site-level incident.

Also at the primary site, the IPStor Synchronous Mirroring option has brought the required stability to the storage subsystem there, protecting against disk outages and other device, cabinet or frame-level failures. IPStor TimeMark^®/TimeView^® (disk-based nearline backup/restore) options provide ADS Portal with up-to-the-minute protection and granular recovery using low-cost disk: the TimeMark option provides snapshots with transactional integrity and point-in-time consistency during data replication for instant recovery to a known good point in time.

FalconStor Snapshot Director for VMware^® also adds significantly to the data protection for ADS Portal’s VMware ESX Server 3.0 virtual machines by providing transactionally consistent recovery - an important enhancement to the crash consistency inherent to VMware.

Steve Whitfield, Sales Manager at Intercept IT, said: “This project is a case of a company being prompted to review the storage status quo for one reason and then finding they could simultaneously address a host of other things a lot more easily than they originally thought. It’s more cost-effective and causes lower levels of disruption to operations too.”

Thomas Barrett, Northern Europe Regional Director, FalconStor EMEA, said: “What started out as a need to ensure stability seamlessly and painlessly grew into a project to provide full and comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. This is typical of the flexibility of IPStor software.”