StorageTek is to develop and resell a version of FalconStor's IPStor disk pooling and virtualisation software. The strategic alliance between the two companies also gives StorageTek's resellers and its professional services group access to IPStor.

The plan is for StorageTek to use IPStor in data migration and replication projects on heterogeneous SANs, according to Laurence James, StorageTek's UK disk marketing manager. "Our customers want disaster recovery and business continuity, and IPStor fits into that neatly," he says.

James says that IPStor can create storage pools with different properties such as speed and reliability, so information can be provided with the appropriate class of service. "I prefer the concept of storage pooling, rather than virtualisation," he adds.

"In the future, we will offer something like [IBM's] System Managed Storage, which will profile data, understand the class of service it needs and assign it to the appropriate pool - the open systems disk space is closely following what the mainframe people did 20 years ago, and that's no bad thing in my view, because they got it right."

Francis Glorie, European operations veep at rival storage pooling developer DataCore, says the deal will benefit FalconStor and StorageTek, but claims that both are some way behind in the market.

"It's good for them but it's not a strategic shift," he says. "StorageTek has not been overwhelmingly successful in disk." ®