FalconStor is launching a new product today, designed to improve data recovery within the cloud.  RecoverTrac offers DR automation for physical and virtual environments, and will be included as a standard feature for FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP) clients.  The release is among the first major product updates from FalconStor since officially installing its new CEO, James McNiel.

The RecoverTrac tool is also the first DR automation solution to deliver service-oriented recovery for both physical and virtual server infrastructures, highlighting an important goal for FalconStor moving into 2011.  What RecoverTrac does is automates complex, error-prone failover and failback oprations of systems, applications, services and entire datacenters, rounding out FalconStor’s CDP platform as a comprehensive system for disk-based data protection.

It does so by replicating data, and also staging the recovery of complete services, facilitating service-oriented data protection with automated server resumption.  This preserves networks and applications in a pre-determined, and more importantly, coordinated process.  With support for virtual machines and networks, this hybrid approach is helping to flesh out customer needs for managing and ensuring data availability in the cloud.

“FalconStor’s RecoverTrac feature has allowed us to significantly decrease the amount of time needed to activate or test our disaster recovery site,” said Jeff Hutchinson, director of information technology at Mendes & Mount, LLP. “The ability to easily create, store and rerun RecoverTrac jobs greatly reduces the need for manual intervention. Previously, we had to create a lengthy and cumbersome step-by-step manual for our DR procedure, but the RecoverTrac tool has simplified this to single, simple page.”

RecoverTrac also has a test mode, and the ability to clone.  This aids in the implementation and management process, granting access to the new product’s features without impacting your systems.  It’s objective fits well with FalconStor’s overall aim to create a smooth methodology around backup and restore, keeping in line with the core concepts of the company’s most efficient products.

Maintaining this focus on a company-wide scale, CEO McNiel has his work cut out for him, as he leads FalconStor in a revised direction.  Now that the company is over ten years old, “the aspect of storage  that’s most important to us and customers is protecting their data,” McNiel tells me during an interview.  “It may seem trite, but it’s a sacred bond between us and customers.”

For McNiel, innovation is “hugely important now, as backup is fundamentally broken.”  FalconStor has set out to fix it, and McNiel’s team dons its collective thinking cap to discover creative solutions.  “The old snapshot technology doesn’t contextualize what’s being protected, so a new management system is needed for the enterprise.”

Wikibon Senior Analyst David Floyer believes that “a new model of data protection based on an underlying snapshot technology offers a far more flexible strategy to meet Infrastructure 2.0 requirements. How often the snapshots are run, how quickly they are transferred to a remote site and how quickly the data can be recovered remotely can be varied to meet the business requirement.

FalconStor’s vision is in line with these requirements. The announcement of RecoverTrac is a significant enhancement to its Continuous Data Protector offering, in particular because it provides automated fail-over and fail-back.”