FalconStor Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: FALC), the market leader in disk-based data protection solutions, today announced the deployment of a Fibre Channel FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS), powered by the FalconStor IPStor^® storage virtualisation platform, at the Office National Interprofessionel des Grandes Cultures (ONIGC). The FalconStor NSS solution, installed by FalconStor partner Astelis, ensures that anticipated storage growth over the next five years can be accommodated, providing ONIGC not only the necessary immediate data protection snapshot services, but additionally a clear path to deploying a disk-to-disk backup solution at a later date.

The increased need for storage capacity at ONIGC is being driven primarily by a dramatic rise in the use of email, which is generating a volume of messages that archiving can only partly offset. With the organisation’s use of email expected to grow significantly over the next few years, ONIGC was determined that its new storage infrastructure would be able to keep pace with the resulting growth in data volume.

The new storage infrastructure at ONIGC is comprised of two EMC CLARiiON CX300 networked storage systems, managed by a pair of standard FalconStor NSS servers running Fibre Channel protocol in active-active failover mode. This storage subsystem serves eight Novell NetWare^® servers, to which the FalconStor NSS servers provide synchronous mirroring and TimeMark^® snapshot services. These advanced storage services protect ONIGC against storage device failure, increase data availability, and deliver the ability to instantly recover a single file or an entire volume back to a known good point in time.

The FalconStor NSS solution has also helped to ease the provision of additional storage as additional capacity is required. It enables administrators to allocate, from a single, virtualised storage pool, many storage volumes to be used by the heterogeneous servers.

Marc Blaise, Manager of the Open Systems Division, ONIGC said: “Our task was to achieve scalability, security and high availability of data in the enterprise, with a solution that is compatible with our existing infrastructure. It also needed to be easy to manage and compatible with our Novell NetWare and Novell GroupWise environments. The FalconStor NSS solution gave us the exact advanced storage services we needed, such as synchronous mirroring and snapshots, in our heterogeneous environment.”

Anne-Marie Renaudie, FalconStor Sales Manager for France, said: “The deployment for ONIGC is an excellent example of a solution that provides the benefits that are needed now, along with future-proofing. Immediately, ONIGC is enjoying the high availability and ease of management and, when they are ready, will benefit from the easy integration of a disk-to-disk backup solution.”