PlateSpin White Paper Sample

Traditional disaster recovery infrastructures including tape backup, image capture, high-end replication and hardware clustering have failed to keep pace with business requirements for recovery speed and integrity at a reasonable cost. Budgetary constraints and the high cost and complexity of established recovery solutions mean that most organizations can afford to protect only a fraction of their total server infrastructure – typically only their most business-critical server workloads. This common protection scenario leaves the majority of the server network under-insured in the event of downtime or disaster.

While organizations can easily justify the expense of protecting business-critical server workloads such as customer-facing applications (e.g. web servers and online order processing), it is harder to find sufficient funds to protect workloads deemed less critical such as email servers, internal Web servers or batch reporting applications. Protection plans for these types of workloads, which constitute the majority of an organization’s infrastructure, might be described as "best effort."

There is a fine line between downtime being merely a minor inconvenience to internal users and resulting in lost opportunities. When a system – any system – is down, business and employee productivity suffers. An internal web server failure, for instance, may impede the ability of a technology company to prepare sales proposals using existing documentation stored on an intranet. If repeated outages prevent employees from accessing corporate systems or completing tasks, the long-term negative effects can be significant. If a server workload is worth running in the first place, it is also worth protecting...