FreeStor End to End Analytics – Using Data Insights to Better Manage Your Storage
 
FalconStor’s Software-Defined Storage Platform Adds End-to-End Predictive Analytics
 
Note from DSA Editor: FalconStor are a company that is making transition to be relevant. At their core they know how to virtualize. Their genesis was pioneering in Virtual Tape Library today they have moved this understanding of abstraction into pioneering true Software Defined Storage (SDS). This announcement about predictive analytics demonstrates how SDS will continue to provide tangible yet sometimes unexpected advantages to the whole process of managing storage. FreeStor is a layer of abstraction that can sit over multiple physical storage platforms. The power of having predictive analytics across multiple platforms is significant. In truth this is just the start, as the richness of the analytics improves, the ability to drive efficiencies and performance from underlying storage will continue to improve.

 
April 12, 2016 — FalconStor Software^® Inc. (NASDAQ: FALC), a 16-year innovator of software-defined storage solutions, further strengthened its FreeStor^® converged, hardware-agnostic, software-defined storage and data services platform with the introduction of intelligent predictive analytics that uniquely offers insight across heterogeneous storage environments. This enhancement empowers users with the ability to take action, both proactively and reactively, as needed to better manage and monitor business-critical data end to end.
 
FreeStor is a software-defined storage platform that gives customers the power to seamlessly migrate, recover, protect and deduplicate data – on or off the cloud – without tying their business to specific hardware, networks or protocols. 
 
FreeStor’s new Intelligent Predictive Analytics provides real-time and historical analytics across heterogeneous storage systems to better manage capacity, performance, and availability. 
 
By combining Intelligent Abstraction with Predictive Analytics, users are able to take intelligent action based on real-time information to optimize and maintain their storage environment from a single pane of glass regardless of storage vendor or location.
 
In our view at DSA predictive and real time analysis capability is not a nice to have it will become a key requirement of abstracted software defined storage. Driving efficiency is a key reason for SDS and real time analytics is the way to make this happen. The question that users will need to ask and prove, is just how effective are the analytics that FreeStor provides?
 
According to Thomas Blank from Fujitsu TDS even this first implementation of FreeStor Analytics really does provide tangible value “FreeStor Analytics optimizes daily work in a way no other solution does. It is the answer to today’s challenges of our service provider business: Time to market, scalability, and state-of-the-art centralized management, resource prediction and API for external cloud tools or self-developed scripts. Together with its scalable and robust storage virtualization engine, FreeStor provides the flexibility our customers need to successfully drive their business.”
 
“Some vendors offer reporting tools with their solutions, but either the information they provide is exclusive to that particular solution or it leaves it up to the user to figure out what the reports mean before real action can be taken,” said Sandor Orban, Technical Lead Infrastructure Services at Sunrise Communications.  “FreeStor’s analytics not only cover our entire storage infrastructure, regardless of whose equipment we are using, but it helps us to see where we are at and where we are going so that we can take the appropriate action before trouble hits.  This is invaluable since downtime is unacceptable.  Having predictive analytics in addition to the optimization, protection, availability, and migration functionality of FreeStor makes it a fundamental element as far as implementing it in our data centers.”
 
The latest version of FreeStor includes the following new features:
•       Centralized monitoring, analytics, reporting and provisioning across multiple storage servers
•       New management GUI which simplifies storage management and improves usability
•       Historical and real-time trends and reports for performance, health and inventory
•       Advanced analytics for real-time insights and informed decisions
•       Real-time performance, health and inventory monitoring end to end; from connected hosts, to virtual LUNs, to the storage pool to physical disks
•       Service-level monitoring through both proactive and reactive smart rules and alerts
•       Personalized, customizable dashboards for complete flexibility for storage administrators
•       Native iPhone/Android applications for anytime and anywhere monitoring
•       OpenStack Cinder Driver
•       SAP Hana Certification
 
Gary Quin, FalconStor President and CEO encapsulated the benefit succinctly “Now is the time for a new, comprehensive approach to overcoming the real-world infrastructure and data management challenges facing enterprises, MSPs and CSPs today. FreeStor’s Intelligent Abstraction makes current and future storage more efficient and available, allowing users to better manage capacity, performance, and availability across the entire infrastructure.”