A company is to release a hardware appliance dedicated to disaster recovery for physical and virtual servers.

Canadian firm PlateSpin’s Forge uses VMware software on a Dell server pre-packaged with storage and all necessary applications to protect up to 25 workloads. Administrators can receive failure alerts by email or a web-based user interface and can activate recovery with a single click.

“This is for a branch office or smaller company that doesn’t have a good backup strategy and doesn’t want to put another bunch of servers on to take care of the problem,” said Stephen Pollack, PlateSpin chief executive.

The state of the protection cover can also be inspected through a dashboard, helping firms demonstrate compliance with best practice to regulators and others.

“One of the key pain points is testing recovery but how often do you prove you can fail over?” Pollack asked.