It is the first VirtualTape Library Competence Centre in Toulouse, France.

FalconStor Software, Inc., a disk-based data protection solutions comapany has opened its first VirtualTape Library Competence Centre in Toulouse, France. The VTL Competence Centre will serve the company's partners and customers worldwide. It claims to provide one of the most advanced environments in the world for the development of storage and data protection skills and best practices.

The Competence Centre aims at providing a laboratory environment for building enterprise-class virtual tape library, single instance repository solutions and proof of concept configurations to customer specifications. It is also to be used to write specifications for new VTL features, for testing and stressing those features, and develop operating practices and white papers.

The company declares that the centre comprises a fully-functional test environment for experimentation, development, deployment and demonstration and is said to be equipped with all the hardware and accessories needed to replicate typical and atypical VTL configurations.

ReiJane Huai, FalconStor's chief executive officer, said: "FalconStor delivers the best VTL solutions in the world and has unrivalled expertise in this whole area of storage and data protection. Our new facility provides us with the perfect environment to drive our development forwards, while enabling our partners and customers to extract every last ounce of value from their investment in our solutions."