Disaster recovery sizing capabilities in PlateSpin Recon 4

NetIQ announced the general availability of PlateSpin® Recon 4, the latest version of the company's planning and analysis solution that takes the guesswork out of estimating the infrastructure needed to protect today's virtual and physical server workloads.

While most enterprises size their virtualised environments for optimal consolidation and performance, this capability has long been missing from backup and disaster recovery products. Historically, one of the challenges of disaster recovery has been that companies could only analyse the most basic characteristics of their workloads and storage footprint, instead of having more granular data that would let them optimise their backup processes to minimise data loss and make more efficient use of their existing infrastructure. This has created a dilemma for IT departments, forcing them to overspend on their physical and virtual backup infrastructure to hedge against potentially catastrophic backup failure, without improving the effectiveness of their backup strategy.

PlateSpin Recon 4 solves these problems by coupling PlateSpin’s superior server consolidation capabilities, with deeper insights into their existing workloads to develop a more efficient backup plan. It provides hard data and models scenarios to report on the exact specifications needed for a new disaster recovery environment and provides recommendations on frequency of backups, features that lower the cost of capital expenditures and labor costs for IT departments, respectively. By providing the opportunity to assess and validate their backup and recovery plans in advance, PlateSpin Recon 4 provides users with a new level of intelligence for backup and disaster recovery planning. It further reduces the costs of maintaining a backup infrastructure and minimises potential business loss and disruption by allowing users to accurately plan for backup and recovery scenarios before disaster strikes.

“Many existing backup and recovery solutions barely scratch the surface when sizing backups. For instance, they examine the size of a workload or how many physical resources are devoted to supporting it. However, PlateSpin Recon 4 looks deeper, analysing the rate of change of the storage footprint,” said Mike Robinson, senior solution marketing manager at NetIQ. “By pairing these kinds of analytical tools with PlateSpin Recon’s other abilities to model backup environment, users can more accurately plan their backup infrastructure and improve the efficiency of their backup environment.”