Months after the collapse of the US financial system, almost all countries with a very few exceptions find themselves still struggling to get out of the claws of the crunch. Sri Lanka too has felt its effects and like many others have implemented tight monetary budgets, cost cutting methods, volatile data growth and many such actions.  Accordingly, companies are forced to revaluate and find out the best disaster recovery system to suit the company budget amidst financial precincts.

A global software corporation, Novell, Inc. has now focused its attention to the Sri Lankan corporate market with the aim of promoting a cost benefit disaster recovery system now in high demand in the European and Australian markets.

A Disaster Recovery(DR)  system built on virtualization which fits in the middle of the traditional DR practises which is the infrastructure mirroring approach and back up or archive based solutions, is the new model Novell aims at promoting in Sri Lanka.

Novell Country Manager for India and Sri Lanka, Sandeep Menon speaking to the Daily Mirror FT stated that with the current crisis affecting almost all business in Sri Lanka, cost effective disaster recovery planing as that could be expected from virtualization will be a hit in the Sri Lankan corporate world.

“Virtualization has shown immense potential in the European and the Australian market but has shown a slow growth in the Asia Pacific region. However it is believed that the heat of virtualization has turned up in South Asia. Novell therefore aims at India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as pilot testing countries and looks forward for a strong uptake in 2010,” Mr. Menon said.

However, he stated that due to virtualization technology still being a new concept in most parts, Virtualization has not been adopted on a large scale in the prodiction environment.

Nevertheless Virtual server technologies provide companies with the ability to do more with less, enabling the consolidation of data and applications onto a single server. The result is reduced costs, simplified IT management, and minimized space requirements. “The need to promote these virtualized systems is imperative and in situations where companies are looking to reduce the costs associated with disaster recovery planning, virtualization enables easier recovery without a great deal of additional costs involved.”

Virtualization effectively brings the concept of mirroring and data archiving to surface but with drastic cost reductions. It has effectively bridged the gap between mirroring and backup.

Instead of the high cost, infrastructure mirroring offers with duplicating images which doubles the initial cost plus the additional costs of territory components and implementation and maintenance.  “A simple footprint virtual server environment has the ability to mirror or protect a large footprint of physical production servers; that is the mirroring effect. In the context of traditional archive based solutions, virtual machines can provide the same recovery workflow with much flexibility and performance,” alleged Mr. Menon.

“By leveraging VM snapshots, virtualization offers the ability to create a snapshot copy of an archive that can be booted in a particular place and tested easily and quickly, with no impact on production.”

This system not only leverage cost but also calls for easier manageability and less space for its implementation as 10, 50 servers are connected in just one box.

“Day by day the IT field is becoming more mission critical. Now it’s not just the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that is regarded as mission critical but also e-mails and such activities are regarded the same. Therefore instigating a technology such as virtualization would save all such actions to be tested and used.”

Based on the virtualization technology, Novell Inc introduced its latest disaster recovery model the Novell PlateSpin Disaster Recovery products which offer innovative ways to safeguard your data center through consolidated recovery and flexible image retore.

“There are other IT companies with Disaster Recovery products but their products compare to Novell’s PlateSpin Products have backup manufacturers servers since its based on virtualization. Many engage in the basic data backup recovery which is one end of the spectrum. On the other end there are complex exercises like that of HP products; there are many implications and is worth millions of dollars of products with Special software to maintain the original centre.”

“However such complexities do not exists in PlateSpin products,” Mr. Menon assessed stating that this was one of the key features that would maintain significant demand for PlateSpin products in Sri Lanka. “It’s a plug and play box. All pre configured, and doesn’t need much hassle to implement and maintain.”

On creating awareness in the local market, Mr. Menon stated that discussions are being held to expand the partner presence in Sri Lanka. “We hope to sign in at least 3, 4 partners and support them through pre market procedures,” Mr. Menon said.

Novell products including the PlateSpin products are available in the local market through the distribution channel Redington Limited.