Data protection firm FalconStor received a Network World Asia Information Management Award this month in recognition of its virtual tape library solution. The company managed to come out on top in the backup category, one of the 21 industries that were reviewed by panelists.

“We wish to congratulate FalconStor for developing a backup-and-recovery solution that our editors and the majority of the 100 Asian CIOs we surveyed voted as the leader in this category,” said Victor Ng, South-East Asia bureau chief of Network World Asia. “The FalconStor VTL solution fared exceptionally well, especially in terms of its widespread reputation and acceptance among Asian enterprises and users’ feedback on its durability, ease of deployment, performance and scalability.”

VTL is a fairly popular product in the U.S. and other regions as well. The disk-based solution ships with built in dedupe and offers backup speeds as high as 1.6 GB per second or 5.8 TB per hour. It’s considered a very reliable product overall, but the company has had a fairly rough time selling it in the past couple of years.

Bert Latamore discussed FalconStor’s position in a post that went out late last month: a lot of partners lost interest in the once very channel-reliant vendor, and FalconStor had to start thinking about building up a sales channel of its own. This forced shift, added up with the legal trouble that the company went through in 2010, took a big toll on revenue growth.

FalconStor is still hanging in there, though, most recently with a number of big wins in the education sector. A release from earlier this month disclosed a rather lengthy list of academic institutions and K-12s that leverage VTL to support the infrastructure used by students and faculty.