Yes. However, we strongly recommend having this done by your chosen reseller partner to ensure compatible components are used. If you add components not installed by us or one of our certified partners, you do so at your own risk. You are also responsible for installing and maintaining the additional components. If you damage the appliance while installing the additional components, or damage results from the additional component, then you will be responsible for repairing the appliance. In the event of a hardware warranty scenario you may be required to remove the additional component before services are provided.
No. Adding additional internal storage to your PlateSpin Forge® appliance is not permitted and is unsupported. The only supported method for expanding the storage capacity of your PlateSpin Forge appliance is by connection to an external storage device (i.e., SAN, NAS). This can be accomplished by attaching external iSCSI storage or by upgrading PlateSpin Forge with a Fibre Channel card (which can be purchased from us) and attaching any Fibre Channel storage.
Yes, PlateSpin Forge users can purchase additional server licenses in increments of five.
The main advantage of using block transfer is the reduced size of incremental replications, as only the changed blocks are transferred. This is particularly important when protecting servers with large files, such as databases.
The advantage of using file transfer is that it allows the protected volumes to be resized (unlike with block transfers). This is useful if you're protecting a 1TB file server that's only using 10 percent of that space and you don't want to pre-allocate 1TB on PlateSpin Forge.
Both file and block transfers leverage Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service. This technology ensures server consistency during replication.
Yes, but to avoid conflicts, you should schedule the replications so that they do not occur at the same time.
One of the applications (PlateSpin Forge or the third-party app) may not be able to perform the scheduled operation. For example, PlateSpin Forge may fail to perform an incremental replication. The next scheduled replication, however, will pick up all the changes.
Yes. However, third party application behavior cannot be guaranteed.
Yes. PlateSpin Forge offers easy to deploy and easy to manage disaster recovery for most x86 based servers running both Windows and Linux. Users no longer need to worry about managing separate systems and products for protection of Windows or Linux environments, and can instead standardize all Disaster Recovery plans on to PlateSpin Forge.
PlateSpin Forge does not support NetWare® servers, but does support protecting Open Enterprise Server 2 servers.
Whenever you relocate your PlateSpin Forge appliance, you need to change the IP addresses of its components to reflect the new environment. These are the IP addresses you specified during the initial setup of the appliance. The product documentation provides detailed steps of how to make the changes.
On the Tech Specs tab for each PlateSpin product, we only list the base versions that we support. Our policy for service packs and other minor updates is as follows:
Platform support
We support all minor updates and service packs for all the platforms that are listed in our product documentation.
Platform verification
There is a difference between platform support and verification. Platform verification is a guarantee that the specific version of the platform will work with the product out of the box. Verification involves running a series of tests in our lab and ensuring there are no issues with the specific platform and the tested product version. We go through the verification exercise every time we have a major or minor release. If time allows, we also verify any in-between releases.
