PlateSpin Introduces “Plug In and Protect� Virtualized Recovery Appliance

PlateSpin Ltd., a provider of unified workload lifecycle management solutions for the enterprise data center, today announced an innovative disaster recovery hardware appliance for protecting physical and virtual server workloads using VMware infrastructure as a foundation for the solution. PlateSpin Forge is a purpose-built consolidated recovery solution that includes prepackaged and preconfigured hardware, software and virtual infrastructure to dramatically accelerate deployment, simplify configuration and reduce total cost of ownership. PlateSpin Forge’s unique combination of simplicity and cost-effectiveness makes it ideal for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as departmental or branch office use within larger enterprises.

“Traditional recovery infrastructures have failed to keep pace with business requirements,” said Stephen Pollack, founder and CEO of PlateSpin Ltd. “Organizations often have had to choose between costly and complex clustering and high-end replication solutions or suboptimal lower-cost alternatives like tape backups that can be slow and cumbersome to test and restore. Offering a comprehensive, affordable and easy-to-use appliance for protecting the majority of workloads in the data center, PlateSpin Forge provides a new alternative for deploying and managing disaster recovery solutions. With PlateSpin Forge, organizations can achieve recovery time and point objectives that approach the level of protection provided by clustering for a cost that is closer to imaging and tape backup solutions. As enterprises explore new ways to extend their use of infrastructure virtualization technologies, PlateSpin Forge makes it easy and affordable to implement, manage and test a virtual recovery infrastructure designed to protect both physical and virtual assets in the data center.”

“Consolidation was the primary driver that fueled the first wave of server virtualization adoption, and affordable resiliency will fuel the next wave,” according to Stephanie Balaouras and Christopher Voce of Forrester Research (Forrester, "X86 Server Virtualization for High Availability and Disaster Recovery,” October 24, 2007). “Virtualization has lowered the cost of providing resiliency to a low enough point that firms are all but obliged to consider deploying virtualization to support a much broader set of applications than they might have in the past.”

“The requirement for disaster recovery is driving the increasing adoption of virtualization in the data center,” said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware. “We look forward to PlateSpin’s new Forge to provide our joint customers with a simplified solution for protecting their physical and virtual workloads.”

Building on PlateSpin’s track record of offering cost-effective consolidated recovery options that leverage virtualization, PlateSpin Forge is the next logical step toward reducing the cost, complexity and risk associated with implementing and testing a recovery solution. Providing complete system and data protection in an easy-to-implement package that includes Dell hardware, storage and application costs, PlateSpin Forge puts full workload protection and recovery within reach for all organizations regardless of size or recovery budget. Moreover, the turnkey PlateSpin solution reduces the time and specialized technical resources needed to plan, provision and deploy a recovery environment. With PlateSpin Forge, organizations can begin protecting their physical and virtual workloads in a matter of hours as opposed to months.  

“Dell’s collaboration with enterprise solution providers such as PlateSpin helps drive IT simplification into the data center in new ways,” said Rick Becker, vice president of solutions, Dell Product Group. “By combining our award-winning PowerEdge servers with PlateSpin’s new  virtualized data protection appliance, customers can greatly reduce the cost and complexity associated with disaster recovery and begin focusing more on innovation and growing their businesses.”

In terms of total cost of ownership, PlateSpin Forge offers an extremely affordable alternative to traditional recovery infrastructures and host-based replication solutions which typically require costly one-to-one hardware and software redundancy. By consolidating workloads onto the purpose-built PlateSpin Forge appliance, organizations can achieve a 25 to 1 workload protection ratio without incurring the expense of duplicate hardware and software licensing costs.    

Key Features of PlateSpin Forge include:  

Plug In and Protect Workloads – Each PlateSpin Forge appliance provides complete protection for up to 25 physical or virtual workloads straight out of the box. All necessary hardware, storage, applications and virtualization technology are pre-packaged and ready to go, significantly reducing the time and effort required to deploy and configure a recovery solution.

Rapid One-Click Recovery – In the event of a disaster, recovery time is just a matter of powering on PlateSpin Forge’s virtual standby workload. Upon receiving a failure alert by email, Blackberry or within the Web-based user interface, the administrator can rapidly recover workloads with a single mouse click.

Failback Flexibility – Leveraging PlateSpin’s multiplatform Workload Portability technology, PlateSpin Forge provides a highly flexible restore capability. Workload failback can be rapidly executed to any physical or virtual host regardless of manufacturer, make or model.

Simple, Integrated Management – PlateSpin Forge includes an intuitive Web-based interface for managing, monitoring and reporting on all aspects of workload protection and recovery. An ever-present dashboard enables users to view the status of their protection plan at all times. The Web-based interface is extremely easy to use, dramatically reducing the time, effort and training required to ramp-up and administer the recovery solution.   

Workload Protection Metrics – Through purpose-built, preconfigured reporting, users can quickly access all the pertinent metrics needed to report on the health of their recovery and protection plans such as actual versus target recovery objectives, replication window sizing and protection logs for auditing purposes. All reports can be exported into Microsoft Excel for further analysis or raw report data can be queried through a simple ODBC connection.

Whole Workload Replication – PlateSpin Forge enables data centers to protect both system and data volumes within a single bootable recovery environment to avoid the common hassle of disjointed system and data restore. Schedule incremental workload replication at either the file or block level to achieve different recovery point objectives (RPO). Organizations can affordably protect physical and virtual workloads within a single technology investment. Workloads can be protected locally or remotely across a wide area network (WAN) to facilitate off-site recovery in the event of a so-called “Big D” disaster.

Easy Test Recovery – Simple one-click test recovery allows the data center user to rapidly test the integrity of workload replication. With a mouse click, the user can take a virtual snapshot of the recovery workload, power it on within a private internal network and quickly validate the recovery plan. Because the test snapshot is fenced off from the production network, the user can work freely without having to be concerned with conflicts or the integrity of the production environment. Since tests are performed on a disposable snapshot that can simply be removed when testing is complete, there is no need to run a full replication as with most other replication solutions.

Failover Preparation – In the event of a possible production failure, users are able power up the recovery workload on a fenced off network while the failure is confirmed. Users can then go live with the workload and rapidly “drop the fence” to bring the recovery workload online to failover for the production system or simply shutdown the recovery workload if the failure is a false alarm.

Product Packaging
The PlateSpin Forge appliance ships with the following pre-packaged standard configuration to ensure that it is ready to go out-of-the-box:
Processor: dual Processor, Quad Core 2.6 GHz
Memory: 16 GB RAM
I/O Resource: 6 Gigabit Ethernet NIC Ports
Storage: 2.5 TB SATA RAID 5

This configuration will protect up to 25 workloads or 2.5 TB of data. Customers wishing to protect more than 25 workloads may purchase additional appliances.

PlateSpin Forge will be generally available in North America on January 15, 2008. Package pricing includes hardware, storage and application costs. 

PlateSpin Ltd.