FalconStor Software Inc. is back. That’s the message chief exec Gary Quinn (right) and marketing VP Tim Sheets conveyed in their interview with theCUBE on the occasion of the the debut of the company’s software-defined storage platform this morning.

FreeStor is the culmination of a journey that started over a decade ago in the era of tape drives and punch cards with the goal of helping organizations handle their information more effectively. That vision has remained unchanged over the years, according to Quinn, but the company is now adapting it for the new age of enterprise computing.

“We have the ability to seamlessly migrate customers on and off the cloud, protect that data, virtualize it and enable customers to choose the right storage,” he told theCUBE host David Vellante. “That is what differentiates us going forward into this new world of cloud and flash.”

The platform attempts to unify the growing variety of components in enterprise environments under a centralized interface for handling the movement and protection of data. Other vendors are taking similar approaches, but FalconStor promises to do away with the complexity of heterogeneous architectures altogether rather than merely hide the mess behind a sleek dashboard.

The key to that approach, according to Sheets, lies with the underlying building blocks. An organization needs the ability to implement the technologies that best address its specific requirements in order to extract value from its infrastructure as opposed to merely managing the complexity. In other words, it needs to make smart choices.

FreeStorm is meant to “give customers the flexibility to choose the right storage and the right data services for what their applications demand, getting rid of vendor lock-in,” Sheets said. The platform removes the compatibility barriers that limit organizations to buying only specific gear with a reworked implementation of the company’s IPStor technology that elevates management to a higher level of abstraction.

From there, Quinn said administrators can gain a better view of operations and apply data services across their entire environments in a consistent manner. FreeStor propagates operations down to the individual hardware components in the most optimal way, taking advantage of the benefits associated with each media type. Solid-state memory is a particularly big emphasis in the platform, with the company actively promoting it to flash storage vendors.

Software-defined storage angle

There’s a massive opening for a software-defined storage stack in that space, Quinn noted. New-generation array makers pose a major threat to the industry’s incumbent disk giants but often lack the management capabilities of their more established rivals, a gap that FreeStor can help bridge.

“They’re really good at hardware, but the software is not their forte,” the CEO said. “Once they look at what FalconStor has done for the last 15 years, they see that’s something they should have as they go into the enterprise because it’s a higher level of capability. It’s a different game in the enterprise.”

In his definition of software-led storage, Wikibon analyst David Floyer has noted that a goal of the software-defined data center is to deliver valuable services regardless of the underlying hardware.  “FalconStor’s FreeStor is looking to do for storage hardware what VMware’s virtualization did to compute hardware,” said Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman. “Users do not want to have functionality frozen on the day that they buy hardware. A software-led strategy such as FreeStor allows the separation of infrastructure refresh cycles from the services that are available.”

The emphasis on partnering with storage vendors is part of a broader channel-focused strategy for FreeStor that also extends to the company’s earlier point solutions. According to Sheets, FalconStor intends to pursue a dual roadmap that will see major upgrades for the platform ported to its existing tools and vice versa so as to align the long-term growth plan with current business demands.

“We’ll help our channel partners understand the value of FreeStor and if they’re an integrator that’s got the capabilities to deploy it, we’ll continue to work with them,” he detailed. “But we envision that the majority of our existing partners will stick with our point products.”

Watch the full interview (30:26)