Platespin Forge

PlateSpin Forge disaster recovery appliances provide fast out-of-the-box protection for your server workloads. When servers go down, you can quickly recover business-critical workloads and run them on the PlateSpin Forge appliance until they can be restored to your production environment.

Available in either a 10 or 25 workload protection model, PlateSpin Forge makes it easy to cost-effectively match your recovery investment to the size of your data center.

Cool features of PlateSpin Forge include :

Whole Workload Replication
PlateSpin Forge protects whole server workloads including data, applications and operating systems within a single bootable recovery environment. In contrast to data-centric recovery approaches, whole workload protection provides a context for your recovered data. You can avoid the common hassles of manual system rebuilding and disjointed system and data restore. With PlateSpin Forge, you can affordably protect physical and virtual workloads locally or remotely across a wide area network (WAN).

Rapid One-Click Failover
With PlateSpin Forge, recovering data is as simple as turning on your appliance’s virtual standby workload. The instant you receive a failure alert by email, mobile device or on the web-based user interface, you can rapidly recover workloads with a single mouse click.

Failback Flexibility
Using multi-platform Workload Portability™ technology, PlateSpin Forge provides a wide range of flexible restore options. You can rapidly execute workload failback to almost any physical or virtual host regardless of manufacturer, make or model.

Multiple Recovery Points
PlateSpin Forge supports multiple recovery points, which allow you to roll back to the last known good state of a protected workload. You can also customize the number of recovery points to get the best balance between storage allocation and protection.

SAN Integration
PlateSpin Forge integrates with existing storage area networks to easily accommodate current and future recovery requirements. That means you can benefit from PlateSpin Forge’s unique workload protection capabilities while taking advantage of existing storage within your SAN environment. Powerful dashboard and management capabilities also allow you to seamlessly protect a greater share of workloads across the SAN. PlateSpin Forge supports both iSCSI and fiber channel SANs.

Efficient Workload Protection Over the WAN
If you maintain a site spread out over different locations, PlateSpin Forge protects you. PlateSpin Forge provides highly efficient workload transfer over the WAN. The PlateSpin Forge Server Sync feature enables incremental synchronization for migrating large workloads with no need for a full refresh.

Protection for 64-bit Windows Workloads
PlateSpin Forge provides file-based protection for critical 64-bit Windows workloads such as Microsoft Exchange 2007. As 64-bit Windows servers become more popular, PlateSpin Forge provides a future-proof disaster recovery investment for protecting new and existing workloads.

Events, Tasks and Actionable Alerts
PlateSpin Forge creates, distributes and logs events that let you better manage your disaster recovery plan. For example, you can choose to be notified of events through email, so you don’t have to actively monitor systems to stay on top of your disaster recovery plan. When an event occurs that requires your interaction—such as executing a workload failover—PlateSpin Forge creates a task with associated actions. Then you know exactly what needs to be done to quickly resolve the issue. Finally, event logging gives you a complete audit trail to validate, review and report on your disaster recovery plan.

Protection Tiers
PlateSpin Forge lets you logically group workloads by RTO, RPO and level of criticality. You can set recovery protection tiers based on business service needs rather than technical necessity.

Recovery Resource Pooling
Because a single PlateSpin Forge appliance can protect and recover up to 25 workloads, you can share a pool of recovery resources across your organization. Recovery resource sharing can save you money since you don’t need dedicated duplicate hardware and operating system licenses.

Workload Protection Metrics
With pre-configured reports, you can quickly access all the pertinent metrics you need to view the health of your recovery and protection plans. These reports include 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.

Centralized Management Console
The PlateSpin Forge management console provides “single pane of glass” visibility across multiple PlateSpin Forge appliances. That way, to add an appliance, you only need to plug it in and see it on the one console. This single central console makes it easier to administer and gives you peace of mind knowing that all server workloads are protected in the event of an outage.

“Plug In and Protect” Server Workloads
PlateSpin Forge provides complete protection for up to 25 physical or virtual workloads straight out of the box. All of the necessary hardware, storage, consolidated recovery software and virtualization technology is prepackaged, pre-configured and ready to go. That means it takes less time and effort to deploy a disaster recovery solution.

Simple Web-Based Management
The easy-to-use web-based interface included with PlateSpin Forge lets you manage, monitor and report on all aspects of your workload protection and recovery solution. An ever-present dashboard makes it simple to view the status of your protection plan at all times. You can dramatically reduce the time, effort and training required to ramp up and remotely administer your recovery solution.

Easy Test Failover
One-click test failover lets you rapidly test the integrity of workload replication. With a single mouse click, you can take a virtual snapshot of your recovery workload, power it on within a private internal network and quickly validate your recovery plan. Because the failover test is fenced off from the production network, you can work freely without being concerned about conflicts or the integrity of the production environment. You can test on this disposable snapshot which you can then simply remove when testing is complete. There is no need to run a time-consuming full replication.

Failover Preparation
In the event of a possible production failure, you can power up the recovery workload in a fenced off network while you confirm the failure. You can then go live with the workload and rapidly “drop the fence” to bring the recovery workload online to failover for the production system. If the failure is a false alarm, simply shut down the recovery workload.

Remote Control
Since no boot CDs or physical contact with the primary or recovery workloads is needed, PlateSpin Forge provides a single control point, saving the time and costs associated with having to interact directly with hardware at production or remote recovery sites. This can be particularly valuable in branch office scenarios where central control of a multi-site environment is critical. Additionally, replication agents are automatically deployed and updated.

Multi-tenancy
Protected workloads can be grouped for security administration purposes, allowing a single PlateSpin Forge to protect multiple workloads from different internal departments or external companies.

Industry View on Disaster Recovery :

76% of enterprises have declared a disaster or experienced a major business disruption.*
87% of enterprises have indicated that improving disaster recovery capabilities was critical.**

The Top Reasons :
Cost of Downtime – 56%
Improving Mission Critical Availability – 52%
Requirement to Stay Online 24/7 – 48%
Increased Risk – 44%

*April 3, 2008 – Building The Business Case for Disaster Recovery Spending – Forrester
**June 5, 2008 – The Forrester Wave: Disaster Recovery Services Providers, Q2 2008 – Forrester

A product brochure for Platespin Forge is available here for download.