Novell Releases PlateSpin Protect 8.1

Novell today announced the availability of PlateSpin Protect 8.1. With PlateSpin Protect 8.1 customers can protect and restore whole workloads, from both physical servers and virtual machines, up to 50 percent faster than before, shrinking backup windows and reducing the time needed to restore systems after an outage.

PlateSpin Protect provides the most flexible, reliable and cost-effective solution for protecting physical and virtual workloads in the data center and private cloud. Offering a range of protection alternatives in a single product, PlateSpin Protect provides better RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) than tape at a fraction of the cost of traditional clustering or replication solutions. PlateSpin Protect features:

• Consolidated recovery using warm-standby virtual machines as both the backup media and recovery environment. If a protected physical server goes down, the virtual machine copy of the workload can be running again in minutes using failover functionality not available in traditional backup tools. When the original physical server is replaced, customers can use PlateSpin Protect to failback from the virtual environment to the new physical server, even if the replacement server is a different model or brand. If the original server can be repaired, PlateSpin's unique Server Sync technology makes the failback process even faster by intelligently copying back only the changes that occurred after the failover, instead of the entire workload.
• Incremental backups to PlateSpin Flexible Images. Image backups are easily transportable for remote or

  About Novell

  Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) delivers the best engineered, most interoperable Linux platform and a portfolio of integrated IT management software that helps customers around the world reduce cost, complexity and risk. With our infrastructure software and ecosystem of partnerships, Novell harmoniously integrates mixed IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one. For more information, visit www.novell.com.

  archival purposes and can quickly be restored either to a virtual machine on any supported virtualization platform, or to almost any physical server.

PlateSpin Protect 8.1 features an enhanced and highly robust block-based transfer technology. In contrast to traditional file-based transfers that copy entire files, block-based transfer technology replicates only changed blocks at the disk level, dramatically reducing the amount of data transferred. The enhanced block-based transfer technology in PlateSpin Protect 8.1 is up to 50 percent faster than previous versions, especially over slower high-latency WAN links. For customers replicating workloads over a WAN, faster replications mean lower bandwidth costs, shorter backup windows, and faster workload recovery times.

Other key new features in PlateSpin Protect 8.1 include:

• Server Sync block-based transfers significantly accelerate incremental replications;
• Support for virtual-to-physical Server Sync for failback scenarios and significantly lower restore time to an original repaired server after an outage;
• Support for vSphere 4, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista;
• File-level restore from protected workload images, reducing restore time when only a few files or folders, not the whole workload, is needed.

PlateSpin Protect is an integral component of Novell's PlateSpin Virtualization and Workload Management solutions, which also include PlateSpin Recon, PlateSpin Orchestrate, PlateSpin Protect and PlateSpin Forge. PlateSpin Virtualization and Workload Management solutions enable customers to profile, migrate, manage and protect server workloads and are part of the Novell Service-Driven Data Center which provides solutions to build, manage and measure the next generation data center. Only PlateSpin Virtualization and Workload Management supports the Solaris OS, 32-and 64-bit Windows and Linux servers, as well as all leading hypervisors including VMware vSphere, ESX and ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, Virtual Iron, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with integrated Xen. With PlateSpin Workload Management solutions, customers can consolidate and migrate servers across multiple data center locations, balance workloads between physical servers and virtual machines, and protect a larger number of servers with faster recovery using virtualization.

Availability
PlateSpin Protect 8.1 is available now. For more information, visit http://www.platespin.com/products/protect.

About Novell

Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) delivers the best engineered, most interoperable Linux platform and a portfolio of integrated IT management software that helps customers around the world reduce cost, complexity and risk. With our infrastructure software and ecosystem of partnerships, Novell harmoniously integrates mixed IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one. For more information, visit www.novell.com.