Virtual Machine and Server Consolidation Software Solutions
PlateSpin is a Novell Company

PlateSpin products allow organizations to adopt, manage and extend their use of server virtualization in the data center. With support for physical and virtual machines, as well as images, our products improve the speed and quality of server consolidation, hardware migration and disaster recovery initiatives.

 
Uses of PlateSpin Forge

Protect more workloads in the data center with affordable consolidated recovery.
Recover multiple physical and virtual workloads using a single PlateSpin Forge hardware appliance.

With PlateSpin Forge, organizations can protect workloads across geographically-dispersed sites and rapidly recover in the event of server downtime or a site disaster. By using PlateSpin Forge as a consolidated recovery platform, organizations can better protect a larger percentage of workloads without having to invest in costly duplicate hardware or redundant operating system licenses. In addition to standard file-based replication, high-speed block-level replication options allow enterprise customers to protect high transactional workloads, such as email and database servers.  Efficient incremental transfers ensure that only changes to source data files are replicated to the PlateSpin Forge remote recovery environment, minimizing WAN usage and enabling organizations to efficiently meet recovery point objectives (RPO) with minimal data loss.


Quickly and easily test the integrity of disaster recovery plans and processes.
Gain peace-of-mind that the recovery plan is sound before a disaster occurs.

Experts recommend that recovery solutions should be tested at least every six to twelve months. Despite its importance, regular testing is often overlooked because the complexity of traditional recovery infrastructures makes testing onerous. Test Time Objective (TTO), or the speed and ease with which a recovery plan can be tested, is emerging as a key measure of recovery effectiveness. PlateSpin Forge's one-click test recovery allows users to easily and rapidly test the integrity of the replication and recovery plan. To perform a test failover, PlateSpin Forge takes a snapshot of the recovery workload and powers it on within a "fenced off" private internal network. This allows the user to quickly validate the recovery plan and related business services with no disruption to the production workload. Once the disaster recovery plan has been validated, PlateSpin Forge drops any changes that have occurred on the recovery workload snapshot during the testing process and resumes workload replication.


Take control with rich monitoring, reporting and actionable alerts.
Easily monitor and report on key workload replication and recovery functions.

PlateSpin Forge's Web-based interface provides an ever-present dashboard that enables IT operations specialists to view the status of their protection plans at all times and manage, monitor and report on all aspects of workload protection. In the event of production server downtime or a disaster, administrators are automatically alerted via email. Notification messages enable context-sensitive actions that can be performed simply by clicking a link within the email from a PC, Blackberry® or other mobile device. Rich reporting features enable administrators and business owners to gain a clear picture of how protection resources are being used. Users can report on actual versus target recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO and RPO), replication windows and data transfer rates. Protection logs demonstrate successful replication and recovery tests, providing the audit capabilities required to meet defined service level agreements or regulatory compliance.


Rapidly recover workloads with one-click failover and flexible restore options.
Power on recovery workloads with a single click and restore to the same or different hardware.

In the event of a production server outage or disaster, protected workloads can be rapidly recovered with single-click failover - just reconnect sessions and PlateSpin Forge takes over the workload. The workload can continue to run as normal on the PlateSpin Forge recovery appliance while the production environment is restored. Once the production environment is brought back online, PlateSpin Forge offers flexible options for restoring workloads. If the original production server is repaired and the hardware is intact, users can move the workload from the virtual recovery environment back to the original platform by performing a virtual-to-physical (V2P) workload transfer. If the original hardware cannot be repaired, users can restore the workload with a V2P transfer onto new hardware. Workloads can also be easily moved to a production virtual environment. Flexible, hardware-independent restore means that new hardware may be of a dissimilar make, model or configuration.

 
A NOVELL COMPANY
PlateSpin and Novell are helping organizations worldwide build more flexible, interoperable and cost-effective data center environments. The combination of PlateSpin and Novell products offers customers a powerful data center management platform with solutions for Linux, UNIX and Windows across physical and virtual environments. The global reach of the combined companies allows us to offer enterprises a full range of integrated solutions to make their IT work as one.