Since the acquisition of PlateSpin, Novell has made a few changes within the virtualization management company. Several key management team members left PlateSpin soon after the acquisition -- names like Steven Pollack (CEO), Paul Philp (CTO), and Mark Pilesky (director of corporate marketing), but it doesn't look like Novell intends to slow down.
PlateSpin has been attacking problems in the virtualization world from day one, and they quickly became known for their Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) technology and their technical know-how. As the P2V market advanced, the technology quickly adapted and moved from consolidation to disaster recovery. And Novell chose to split the popular PlateSpin PowerConvert product into two offerings, PlateSpin Migrate and PlateSpin Protect.
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Novell has been pushing forward with a refresh within its PlateSpin management product line. Up first was Migrate, which received an update in early July. And now, Protect is being refreshed to Version 8.1 as well, and it's helping to restore workloads from physical and virtual machines in the datacenter at speeds up to 50% faster than previous versions.
The company said PlateSpin Protect 8.1 features an improved block-based transfer technology, which, in contrast to traditional file-based transfers that copy entire files, replicates only changed blocks at the disk level. Doing so dramatically reduces the amount of data transferred, which translates to cost and time savings for organizations replicating workloads across the WAN.
Protect uses warm-standby virtual machines as both the backup media and the recovery environment. Should a protected physical machine go down, the virtual machine can be up and running within minutes using failover functionality not found in traditional backup tools. And when failback occurs, the replacement server can be a different model or brand than the original physical server. Or if the original server can be repaired, PlateSpin's Server Sync technology can make the failback process faster by copying back only the changes that occurred after the failover, rather than copying back the entire workload.
PlateSpin Protect and Migrate are integral components of Novell's PlateSpin Virtualization and Workload Management solutions, which also include PlateSpin Recon, PlateSpin Orchestrate, and PlateSpin Forge.
Protect 8.1 is available now and has added support for VMware vSphere 4.0, Microsoft Windows Server 2008, and Microsoft Windows Vista.