On April 12, 2016, FalconStor, a 16-year veteran of software-defined storage (SDS) announced enhancements to its software. Coincidentally, Cloudian, a competitor, also announced a major release to its software HyperStore.

Neuralytix recognizes FalconStor as one of the earliest innovators of SDS. FreeStor, its flagship product has evolved over the course of the 16 years FalconStor has been in business – making FreeStor one of the most mature SDS products available on the market today.

In its announcement, FalconStor focused on the areas of monitoring, analytics, reporting, and other management features.

Such features make the job of the storage administrator (or, increasingly, the IT generalist, acting as a storage administrator) easier. SDS helps to bring multiple workloads together onto a singularly presented pool of storage.

However, especially for those with legacy or hybrid storage systems, understanding the heuristics of the data movement and placement can severely impact the performance of the entire storage and compute environments.

Neuralytix Opinion

FalconStor has many customers from small-to-medium businesses (SMB) to large multi-client service providers (SP). Particularly for SPs, the ability to have a deeper understanding of its storage environment will allow its customers to meet their service level agreements (SLAs), and make the allocation and utilization of capacity optimal.