Can you tell us a little bit about Novell/PlateSpin? 

PlateSpin was founded in 2003, and the company most people know is actually the second incarnation of the PlateSpin name. The original PlateSpin had a product that was centered around more general datacenter management, and in the second iteration, the founders had the idea to take the core technology and focus it around virtualization. 

Once we made that change in focus, we saw explosive growth along with the rest of the virtualization space. Initially we brought to market the first, and what is still considered the best, P2V product originally PowerConvert now renamed PlateSpin Migrate, which today also has P2P, V2P, and imaging capabilities. 

More recently we’ve expanded the portfolio to delivering management across the mixed Physical and Virtual datacenter, with our PlateSpin Recon capacity planning product and PlateSpin Orchestrate which is a powerful policy based automation framework. 

Finally, the product line we’ve launched which is arguably our most exciting is our disaster recovery solution with the products PlateSpin Protect and PlateSpin Forge, which deliver to customers a unique, cost effective, yet high performance DR solution by leveraging our core technology plus our virtualization expertise. 

Obviously the biggest turn of events recently was PlateSpin’s acquisition by Novell which closed in the first quarter of 2008. 

How has the marketing or product plans of PlateSpin Forge changed, if at all, since the Novell acquisition? 

The biggest change that Novell has added to our product management and product marketing plans is to introduce a much needed repeatable process in to our roadmap planning. 

As with most small companies, at PlateSpin we were very ad hoc in our product development, which gave us a certain degree of agility, but that agility eventually became a problem as we tried to scale to the next level. 

Overall the new Novell processes have been very well received. 

What are some of the key new features with PlateSpin Forge 2.5? 

The key new features in PlateSpin Forge 2.5 are the addition of our physical server sync technology, and our multi-tenancy features. 

With physical server sync, PlateSpin Forge is arguably the most flexible DR solution on the market in terms of the fail back process. PlateSpin Forge acts as the virtual recovery resource upon disaster, but once a disaster has passed, users have the utmost flexibility in how they choose to fail back, or return to normal. As always we give them the ability to migrate the PlateSpin recovery resources from PlateSpin Forge back out to new bare metal servers or virtual infrastructure. Now with physical server sync, failed servers that can be recovered can now be failed back to by simply sending the changed data from the recovery resource, back to the repaired production server. 

PlateSpin Forge has also added multi-tenancy capabilities which allows for particular users to be given permission to specified recovery resources along with specific administration access. This is a key feature for customers who need to silo their IT resources from department to department, or for managed service providers looking to host multiple distinct users. 

When is Forge a better option for a customer than VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM)? 

When comparing PlateSpin Forge to SRM, really it’s a classic apples to oranges discussion. 

The two core strengths of PlateSpin Forge are the value of the plug-in and protect DR in a box concept, and our ability to protect both Physical and Virtual source workloads. 

Obviously with SRM, customers are looking at a much more complex architecture involving shared disk and array level replication, which is in many ways much more sophisticated than PlateSpin Forge, which comes at a high cost of implementation and management. 

As far as source workloads, again, SRM is focused solely only protecting virtual machines running on an ESX cluster, which falls in line with VMware’s vision of a fully virtualized datacenter of the future. 

In my mind, on both fronts, from a cost and complexity standpoint, as well as with our ability to protect physical servers, we are the perfect solution to compliment customers using something like SRM to fill out and complete their overall end to end DR strategy. 

If you were to say one thing to a customer looking to integrate a disaster recovery solution, such as Forge 2.5, what would it be? 

Typical DR plans will include an annual test period or DR Event. With the speed of business today, that can be a very long period of time, and the amount of change that can occur across a data center and in business process over a 12-month period can be tremendous. With solutions such as PlateSpin Forge, this no longer has to be the case. Leveraging virtualization as an enabling technology, customers now not only have a more cost effective option, but ultimately one that is much more reliable, due to greater testing efficiency. 

All too often testing is not adequate, and issues with a DR plan are not identified until restore procedures are executed, which by then is too late. PlateSpin Forge eliminates this risk with easy one-click testing that can be performed easily at any time. 

Can you give us a sneak peek as to where, in your opinion, PlateSpin/Novell solutions will be in the next few years? 

Here at Novell we’ve always believed that the future of the datacenter was a mix of different vendors and different platforms. We don’t believe that the monolithic sole source IT infrastructure of the past will be returning. Our integration with PlateSpin has further strengthened this core value proposition. All of the products and solutions from Novell are focused on best of breed integration and interoperability across vendors. For anyone looking for more details on what this vision looks like and how all the different components within our portfolio, from a PlateSpin Workload Management standpoint as from the greater Novell view, I’d encourage you to take a look at the Novell Service Driven Datacenter message. 

Jason Dea serves as the Product Marketing Manager responsible for the PlateSpin Workload Management suite, from Novell. He works with the PlateSpin team to help deliver Novell’s market leading datacenter transformation, optimization and disaster recovery product offerings. Contact him here. 

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Related Links:
Check out Platespin Forge , PlateSpin Forge Introductory Demo , Novell Unveils Service-Driven Data Center Vision