FalconStor StorGuard

FalconStor StorGuard (formerly known as FalconStor NSS) is a software solution designed to provide advanced data services for underlying disk arrays without compromising their performance. According to the vendor, this product is aimed at companies of all sizes, ranging from small businesses to large enterprises. It caters to various professionals and industries, including IT administrators and managers, storage administrators, data center managers, system integrators, and cloud service providers.

Key Features

Increase Performance: StorGuard runs on its own compute servers, which the vendor claims can provide advanced data services without impacting the CPU performance of the underlying disk arrays, potentially resulting in increased storage performance.

No Single Point of Failure: The vendor states that StorGuard ensures high availability by utilizing a minimum of 2 compute servers, aiming to eliminate any single point of failure between mission-critical application servers and the storage disk arrays they rely on.

Lightning-fast Snapshots: StorGuard offers what the vendor describes as lightning-fast snapshots of LUNs or groups of LUNs placed into a consistency group, providing storage administrators and backup software with secure recovery points.

Hardware Choice: According to the vendor, StorGuard is compatible with various brands of iSCSI or Fibre Channel disk arrays, allowing customers to continue using their preferred hardware vendors at each site.

Synchronous Replication: The vendor claims that StorGuard replicates writes to LUNs across two potentially heterogeneous disk arrays within a metro-region, utilizing a no-single-point-of-failure architecture.

Asynchronous Replication: When distances exceed a metro-region, StorGuard offers what the vendor calls asynchronous replication to a remote site, allowing source and target switching at any time.

Failover/Failback: StorGuard aims to ensure full disaster recovery by enabling intelligent failover and failback of an entire datacenter, spanning multiple sites and clouds, including compute servers, networking, and storage.

Continuous Data Protection: According to the vendor, StorGuard delivers continuous data protection with millisecond granularity, allowing for fast recoveries to a point before a ransomware attack or other disasters.

Application-consistent Snapshots: StorGuard can run agents on key mission-critical application servers, ensuring they are quiesced before taking a snapshot, aiming to provide a reliable recovery point.

Management: StorGuard is managed through StorSight, a secure, multi-tenant management platform that oversees all StorGuard instances across sites and clouds. According to the vendor, it offers RBAC, detailed reports, billing, smart alerts, and key management.