Case Study: Nichols College achieves server recovery in hours with NetIQ PlateSpin Forge

Nichols College - Customer Case Study

Nichols College, a private four‑year business-focused institution in Dudley, Massachusetts, needed to protect mission‑critical services—particularly online courses and email used by many graduate students—from server outages. The school relied on backup tapes but had no spare servers for rapid recovery, meaning a hardware failure could take a week or more to resolve and disrupt students’ access to learning materials.

Working with GreenPages, Nichols deployed the PlateSpin Forge appliance to replicate 10 Windows server workloads into warm‑standby virtual machines that can be powered up instantly and failed back with one click. The turnkey, web‑managed solution lets the college test disaster recovery and simulate software upgrades, and it cut recovery time from weeks to hours while lowering cost and operational overhead.

Nichols College

Kevin Brassard

Vice President of Information Services