Platespin PowerConvert Product Split - Migrate and Protect
My employer has been a user of PlateSpin PowerConvert for about 2 years now, following a successful trial by myself and a colleague. A couple of weeks back I received an email from Novell about a webinar for PlateSpin Protect. This initially confused me but I eagerly clicked on some of the links to learn more and it appeared that they had split the PowerConvert product in two.
So PowerConvert now becomes PlateSpin Migrate and PlateSpin Protect, but what new features and functionality does this product change bring?
Well on closer inspection, not an awful lot appears to have changed. Platespin Migrate can be likened to the project version of PowerConvert whereby you pay based on usage. It’s sole purpose is for migration whether that be physical to physical, physical to image, physical to virtual, virtual to image and finally virtual to physical.
PlateSpin Protect appears to be a re-branded version of PowerConvert. It concentrates more on workload protection for BCP and DR purposes, including file and block level replication as well as support for incremental updates. If you have PlateSpin Protect you will however have access to the Migration features mentioned above, so if it is a longer term replication / migration tool you’re looking for then you won’t go wrong with this one.
I love the PlateSpin product, it has changed the way we protect our workloads for BCP and DR purposes. It simplifies how we test our recovery plans and it allows us to say for certain that in the event of an outage, we have a way of being back up and running in minutes.
Now this split may be a simple product re-branding, but the positive I see in this is that the PlateSpin Protect software is likely to show itself as the stronger offering that ultimately generates more revenue. With this in mind, I’m hopeful PlateSpin can dedicate more resource and add more features to this product. One I would really like to see is the ability to have the same target server protected and sent to two different locations, one a local data centre BCP copy and the other the remote data centre DR copy.
Click here if you would like to read more about the PlateSpin product family
