March 2008
Features
- Tech Talk 01 Get ready for a new release of GroupWise. Wanna busy search a client's calendar? Go for it. Want more panels on your home view? Track a couple of Web sites in your home view too. Take your pick of these and many more new features in the next release of GroupWise.
- Tech Talk 02 Upgrading from NetWare to the next generation of technology doesn't have to be painful—or costly. Take advantage of all the benefits Open Enterprise Server 2 offers for less and without the pain of retraining your staff. See how this migration path stacks up against moving to the big unknown—Windows Server 2008.
- Tech Talk 03 Try it just once and it'll be the last time you'll want to call support. It's faster, cheaper and unlimited. See how this new support option is going to change the way you want support from Novell.
- Tech Talk 04 Does your enterprise have legacy systems that won't talk to other computers? The hotel industry had that problem-until Novell stepped in. Now, using code that Novell open sourced, the hotel industry can use identity management solutions-on their legacy systems! See how you can teach your old systems to talk.
- Tech Talk 05 The word spin can have a negative connotation—unless it's PlateSpin. Read how Novell's acquisition of Toronto-based PlateSpin is going to give your data center several positive benefits. If you want your data center tasks to manage themselves, welcome to the new Novell technology from PlateSpin.
- Tech Talk 06 For beginners, databases can be frightening. But with a little help in building effective forms, you'll be on your way to populating a database that can almost take care of itself. See how here in our OpenOffice.org series cover the database application included in the free office suite.
- Tech Talk 07 If you're like most companies, your end users' teams are comprised of people across the globe. Yet they want to feel like their teammates are just down the hall. Enter Sitescape. It's now a part of Novell and provides the engine to the new Novell Teaming + Conferencing products. Find out how this recent acquisition benefits you.
Connection Magazine March full .pdf
Departments
- Proof Point Toll Brothers, the leading builder of luxury homes in the U.S., had issues. One was managing desktops across 300 locations, including construction site trailers across 22 states. Keeping them in standard, working order was quite a problem. See how Novell automated that, increased the security of sensitive financial data, and much more.
- Trend Talk Are you up on your backups? Are you a synthetic backer upper? What about your recovery objectives? How will you recover after the crisis strikes? Learn what types of backup and recovery procedures are available, so when the crisis strikes, you'll be up on your backups and know just how to recover.
- Laura Chappell Analysis Session: TCP Connection Loss
The
Right Spin
Managing your data center
just got a whole lot easier
Tech Talk 5 By John Stetic
PlateSpin Forge
PlateSpin Forge is a consolidated recovery hardware appliance that protects both physical and virtual server workloads by using embedded virtualization technology. In the event of a production server outage or disaster, workloads can be rapidly powered on in the PlateSpin Forge recovery environment. There, workloads continue to run as normal until the production environment is restored. The PlateSpin Forge appliance ships with prepackaged storage, consolidated recovery software and virtualization technology that is ready to go out-of-the-box. The standard configuration protects 25 server workloads for up to a total of 2.5 terabytes of data. For larger implementations, multiple appliances can be deployed. Figure 3
PlateSpin Forge puts workload protection and recovery within reach for small and medium-sized enterprises as well as departments and branch offices within larger enterprises. The benefits of dramatically reducing the time and specialized technical resources required to plan, provision, deploy and test a recovery environment is invaluable. With PlateSpin Forge, organizations can begin reliably protecting their physical and virtual workloads in a matter of hours as opposed to months.
Key Features of PlateSpin Forge
Whole Workload Replication—PlateSpin Forge enables data centers to protect the entire server workload including data, applications and operating systems within a single bootable recovery environment. In contrast to data-centric recovery approaches, whole workload protection provides a context for recovered data and allows organizations to avoid the common hassles of manual system rebuilding and disjointed system and data restore. Organizations can affordably protect physical and virtual workloads with a single technology investment. Workloads can be protected locally or remotely across a wide area network to facilitate off-site recovery in the event of a site disaster.
Rapid One-Click Failover—In the event of a disaster, recovery time is just a matter of powering on PlateSpin Forge's virtual standby workload. Upon receiving a failure alert by e-mail, Blackberry or within the Web-based user interface, the administrator can rapidly recover workloads with a single mouse click.
Failback Flexibility—Leveraging PlateSpin's multiplatform Workload Portability technology, PlateSpin Forge provides flexible restore options. Workload failback can be rapidly executed to any physical or virtual host regardless of manufacturer, make or model.
Simple Web-Based Management—PlateSpin Forge includes an intuitive Web-based interface for managing, monitoring and reporting on all aspects of workload protection and recovery. An ever-present dashboard enables users to view the status of their protection plan at all times. The Web-based interface is extremely easy to use, dramatically reducing the time, effort and training required to ramp-up and remotely administer the recovery solution.
Easy Test Failover—Unprecedented one-click test failover allows the data center user to rapidly test the integrity of workload replication. With a mouse click, the user can take a virtual snapshot of the recovery workload, power it on within a private internal network and quickly validate the recovery plan. Because the failover test is fenced off from the production network, the user can work freely without having to be concerned about conflicts or the integrity of the production environment.
PlateSpin and Novell: A Unified Suite of Data Center Solutions
PlateSpin products ease data center pains by enabling organizations to unify their approach to solving common workload lifecycle challenges. The freedom to drag and drop workloads onto the physical or virtual host where they will run most efficiently enables organizations to improve the speed and quality of server consolidation, hardware lease migration, data center relocation and disaster recovery.
Novell and PlateSpin can turn your IT organization into a competitive weapon by offering complete workload lifecycle management and optimization for Windows, UNIX and Linux operating systems in both the physical and virtual data center. Whether you're filling a need for a full solution stack with a powerful virtualization platform or a best-in-class heterogeneous management solution that leverages existing investments in physical or virtual infrastructure, Novell and PlateSpin deliver an unrivaled product portfolio to manage workloads throughout their lifecycle, from provisioning and protection to relocation and optimization.
The combined Novell and PlateSpin solutions will deliver superior value by helping you reduce costs, improve service levels and respond to fluctuating business requirements. Enterprises of all sizes can use the power of Novell and PlateSpin technologies to make their virtual and physical environments work together. By deploying these solutions, you can:
- lower costs by reducing the time and effort required to provision, protect, relocate and optimize server workloads throughout their lifecycle.
- gain the flexibility and agility to provision virtual or physical workloads dynamically and automatically.
- respond more rapidly and flexibly to business requirements for new IT resources.
- increase server utilization by allowing multiple applications to coexist on one physical server.
- reduce power and cooling requirements through virtualization and consolidation.
Summing Up
Hopefully this high-level overview of PlateSpin products has aroused your curiosity about how they can be deployed in your IT environment to improve the speed and quality of your data center initiatives. To learn more about PlateSpin and to download, try or buy PlateSpin products, visit platespin.com.
Figure 1
PlateSpin PowerRecon provides scenario modeling, forecasting and planning capabilities to take the guesswork out of server consolidation, disaster recovery, capacity planning and virtual infrastructure management.
Figure 2
With PlateSpin PowerConvert, enterprises can perform anywhere-to-anywhere server workload migrations across heterogeneous IT infrastructures spanning physical and virtual hosts.
Figure 3
The PlateSpin Forge recovery hardware appliance provides an ever-present Web-based dashboard that enables IT operations specialists to view the status of server workload protection at all times.
