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I don’t think anyone has ever told me that before. In fact if I were to bring up the idea with my wife, I would probably have to sleep on the couch.

The reality is enterprise IT is full of examples where people may as well be saying they’re going to take up smoking. In my years of working with customers, I find it ironic that despite innovation in technology being driven by making things better and easier, oftentimes; the only thing new technology does is make things worse by building on the mistakes of the past.

A case in point is the world of disaster recovery. I was recently at a business continuity event, and actually came across a vendor that was marketing the fact that their tape backup solutions had an over 30% success rate, when customers needed to recover critical lost data. Again, if I were to tell my wife that she had a 30% chance of getting an birthday gift this year… back to the couch. But yet, DR is a market where claims like that are not only accepted, but are celebrated.

I believe the crux of this problem is the way vendors and users have always taken a data focused view of protection. After all, data historically was the only thing that mattered. I believe that the importance of data, is not its existence, but in how it is used. In the datacenter that means which applications use particular data and what decisions are driven from that.

Sure the disaster recovery solutions from Novell – PlateSpin Forge, and PlateSpin Protect – can protect data, but beyond that, PlateSpin protects entire server workloads, including operating systems AND applications. Workloads running as physical servers, virtual machines, running Windows or Linux, we understand that it’s that entire logical unit that matters, not just the underlying data.

Our workload focused approach is not necessarily better, or cheaper than the existing DR solutions on the market. Intelligently managing - and in this case protecting - entire workloads is simply what makes us “different”. My interaction with customers tells me that, being fully satisfied with whatever DR strategy and solutions they have today is VERY UNCOMMON. Maybe it's time we all start thinking "different"... DR as an industry is not a case of "if it ain't broke don't fix it". Rather DR is in my mind something that has always been broken, so nobody has bothered to even try to fix it.

And all you kids out there. The surgeon general says that smoking will kill you.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.