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Look for Disaster Recovery Opportunities in Local Governments and Small- to Medium-Size Enterprises

Governments and businesses worldwide lost more than US$41 billion to downtime in 2009, which is why business continuity and disaster recovery are top IT priorities this year, according to Forrester. We’ve seen this reflected in the United Kingdom, especially among local governments and small- to medium-size enterprises, which have increased their demand for low-cost disaster recovery solutions considerably. These organisations are getting pressure to provide effective yet inexpensive solutions from multiple directions: the amount of data being processed has exploded, government regulations are on the increase, and IT budgets are under severe constraints.

Until recently, these organisations have had two choices: invest in the very expensive proprietary clustering solutions, or purchase inexpensive, generic tape backup devices. The clustering solutions offer a high level of protection, but small- and medium-size organisations can’t afford to run them across all their business applications. We’re finding that customers are using the expensive solutions to protect only their business-critical applications such as web servers and online ordering systems, but they can’t afford this level of protection for the more mundane business tools such as e-mail and reporting applications that also contribute to the business and are required for regulatory compliance. Not protecting these can also be costly. For example, if an e-mail system goes down for a day, employee productivity is lost and the business suffers.

Novell has introduced the PlateSpin Forge solution that provides a great opportunity for your customers and for you. It gives organisations complete disaster recovery protection at an affordable cost. It’s built on a hardware appliance to provide a single solution that is easy to implement, and it integrates with extreme flexibility in existing infrastructures. This solution replicates workloads in an off-line virtual environment, and it provides one-click failover, one-click test restore and flexible failback. UK customers such as the Craig Group, Fishburns Solicitors, British Marine and a number of local governments have found this solution to be “our ideal disaster recovery solution”.

I believe this is an excellent solution for Novell partners. We’ve set margins in excess of 25 percent for new customers, and with the right mix, your returns can exceed 45 percent. For example, a Gold partner that sells the solution to a new customer for £115,000 and provides six days of service would be eligible for margins and rebates of £53,000. We have great customer demand for this product that delivers complete disaster recovery for all business applications and fits right between the expensive clustering solutions and tape-backup devices.