NetIQ announces PlateSpin Forge 700 Series disaster recovery appliances

NetIQ has announced the general availability of the PlateSpin Forge 700 Series, its latest and most powerful disaster recovery appliances for protecting both physical and virtual server workloads in the event of a production server outage or disaster. The PlateSpin Forge 700 Series appliances protect 60% more workloads and provide significantly higher performance and capacity than the previous generation 500 Series. An all-in-one solution with advanced capabilities like disaster recovery requirements sizing and sand-boxed virtual testing, the PlateSpin Forge 700 Series provides a high-capacity high-performance recovery environment that powers enterprise-class workloads efficiently and seamlessly until the production environment is restored.

Recent market research published by Forrester Research recommends that Infrastructure & Operations professionals should replace existing tape backups with disk-based backup appliances to reduce manual efforts and improve recovery time objectives. NetIQ pioneered this approach with a first-of-its-kind disaster recovery appliance in 2008. The PlateSpin Forge 700 Series builds upon that legacy, delivering a faster, more efficient and streamlined approach to protecting today's virtual and physical server workloads, with a very low TCO.

“With PlateSpin Forge, I know that if there is any kind of unplanned outage, we have the safety net of a solution that can restore our core services in twenty minutes,” said Tom Lockhart, IT systems manager for Hastings and Prince Edward Counties Health Unit. “Having a comprehensive solution like the PlateSpin Forge appliance that is extremely simple to setup and use has given me the peace of mind that we can recover our services effectively, quickly and reliably.”

Featuring the latest PlateSpin Forge 11 software, the PlateSpin Forge 700 Series appliances support the latest OS and hypervisor versions from Microsoft, VMware, and others, and include support for new UEFI physical servers with GPT hard drives and boot drives larger than 2TB.

All PlateSpin Forge 700 Series appliances include PlateSpin Recon 4 licenses capable of monitoring the CPU, memory, network bandwidth, and disk utilisation of up to 100 production server workloads for 30 days. Armed with this planning and analysis data, IT professionals can best balance recovery performance with infrastructure costs, assure their workloads are protected while maintaining their service-level agreements in disaster recovery scenarios most efficiently.

“Unplanned downtime can have disastrous effects on a business. Companies need a disaster recovery solution that minimises impact to productivity, revenue and their reputation with their customers,” said Mike Robinson, senior manager, Solution Strategy at NetIQ. “The PlateSpin Forge 700 series all-in-one solution dramatically improves a company’s ability to protect their business-critical assets while offering rapid recovery – and with a far greater value and lower TCO than other solutions.”

PlateSpin Forge 700 Series Models:
· PlateSpin Forge 710: protects up to 10 physical or virtual workloads
· PlateSpin Forge 725: protects up to 25 physical or virtual workloads
· PlateSpin Forge 740: protects up to 40 physical or virtual workloads

Workload licenses can be purchased for each model to protect additional workloads. All three models include:
· Dual 8-core hyper-threaded CPUs, for a total of 32 processor threads
· 128 GB of RAM, expandable to 768 GB
· Over 20 TB of usable RAID-protected storage for workload backups
· Six, gigabit Ethernet ports for fast lag-free operation as a recovery environment