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FalconStor Software

To be or not to be a virtualization company -- that's the question FalconStor Software Inc. (Nasdaq: FALC) was facing.

With virtualization not panning out to be the hot new category everyone expected it to be, companies like FalconStor have been struggling to shake free from the now-stale buzzword and pitch themselves as providers of a complete lineup of storage management software.

"We are positioning ourselves as a provider of network-based infrastructure," says ReiJane Huai, chairman and CEO of FalconStor. "We're becoming more solution focused."

FalconStor launched its flagship software, IPStor, a year and a half ago when the industry was abuzz with the promise of such cutting-edge virtualization software. The Melville, N.Y., company was founded in February 2000 by three former executives of Cheyenne Software, a backup software company bought four years earlier by Computer Associates International (NYSE: CA).

IPStor, which works with both NAS and SANs, virtualizes storage management on the local area network (LAN), thus avoiding drawing on the resources of each server to manage storage. The software lets customers use whatever hardware devices fit their needs and budgets: It's compatible with SCSI, Fibre Channel, Ethernet, and iSCSI without requiring any additional boxes.

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