PlateSpin does VMware disaster recovery on Dell

Known for its physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration and capacity planning tools, PlateSpin Ltd. has claimed a virtualization first: a turnkey disaster recovery hardware appliance based on VMware virtualization.

Announced today, PlateSpin Forge consists of a dual-processor Dell server equipped with 2.5 TB of SATA RAID storage, VMware ESX Server virtualization, the underlying PlateSpin PowerConvert P2V software, and the PlateSpin Forge user interface. Together, these components can protect up to 25 “workloads,” running either Windows or Linux, within a VMware Virtual Machine Disk Format or Virtual Hard Disk format or on a physical box.

“To us, a workload is a workload,” said Cadman Chui, PlateSpin vice president of marketing. Forge, Chui explains, simply takes an image of the workload and saves it as a virtual machine (VM). Then, on a scheduled basis, Forge takes the incremental changes that have happened on the VM and applies them. How often Forge takes an image of the workload depends on its criticality.

Recovery, meanwhile, can take place directly on the Forge hardware appliance or back on another virtual or physical host once it’s available.

PlateSpin competitor Vizioncore developed a similar offering this summer called P2V-DR vRanger Pro Module, but unlike Forge, it’s a software-only product, Chui said, requiring customers to buy and configure the underlying hardware.

PlateSpin will sell Forge at a starting price of $50,000, or $2,000 per protected workload. Chui said that the company’s channel partners think Forge will be a big seller because of its ease of use. “You just press the big green button, and away it goes, doing its thing.”