Adventures in home working

I’m not much of a server guy, but this announcement from Platespin appealed to me,  a server appliance for real-time backup:

Once plugged and configured the system performs live backup of up to 25 physical or virtual servers on continuous basis (incremental backup).

If something bad happens the administrator is informed through the web console or Blackberry email and the latest image of the protected machine gets recovered.

The recovery can happen on any chosen system, thanks to a PlateSpin technology, Workload Portability, which allows a virtual or physical machine to be restored on physical or virtual hardware.

Since testing DR plans is an expensive and time consuming task which few companies really do in the proper way, PlateSpin also introduced the capability to test the disaster recovery: Forge can restore all protected systems into an isolated environment so the entire plan can be verified without impacting on the normal business operations.

In my home lab I’m always flipping between VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server (and clients), with the announcement of a new version of VMware server it looks like another flips on the horizon.  Probably when I update the lab hosts to Windows Server 2008. 

Windows Server 2008 is looking very cool for a home lab,  with the ability to publish terminal services sessions over HTTP to the Internet, Seamless terminal server windows, multi-volume disk encryption (finally a secure home environment).