HP Helion Continuity Services bring disaster recovery to the Cloud

Increased cloud adoption has put new pressures on IT departments to keep business workloads available in the event of a disaster, whether these workloads are running on premise or in the cloud. To add to that pressure, acceptable system recovery times are shrinking from days down to hours and acceptable data loss windows have decreased from hours to minutes for critical applications. With these heightened expectations, budgets and staffing needed to manage business continuity have not kept pace with the demand of shorter recovery response and recovery times.

HP’s cloud-based Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service decreases these burdens on the IT department by offering a new style of IT approach to managing continuity that:
· Improves recovery time by up to 90%;
· Reduces data loss by up to 95%;
· Saves 15% to 50% in costs through a cloud-based As-a-Service pricing model.

“Our previous recovery method was backup to tape, and we needed to better protect our business information and ensure fail-over in case we experienced an outage or a disaster scenario,” says Barry Alford, head of Information and Communications Technology, Paragon Community Housing Group. “HP quickly implemented DRaaS, and helped us simplify and modernize our backup and continuity implementation while significantly improving our performance indicators.”

HP’s enhanced HP Helion Continuity Service helps business lessen the impact caused from system outages, such as lost customers, brand damage, decreased revenue and production downtime. The industry-leading service protects workloads that are run in a client on-premises private cloud, traditional hosting environment or running on the HP Helion Managed Virtual Private Cloud. The previous release of HP Helion Continuity supported physical and virtual Windows servers and clusters as well as Linux servers. The new release provides customers greater choice with support of Linux physical clusters, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), and storage area network (SAN)-based data stores. Additional enhancements provide clients:
· The ability to provision additional storage at the time of recovery to meet short-term needs that arise as a result of changing workload requirements
· The option of a dedicated hypervisor to give clients the ability to host dedicated applications requiring real-time replication
· Improved snapshot integration with 3PAR technology – providing organizations greater flexibility when planning rehearsals
· Support for Linux physical clusters
· Support for Oracle RAC
· SAN based data stores
· Rehearsal support for customer Active Directory servers

“The adoption of cloud technology has brought organizations a tremendous amount of innovation, flexibility and agility in how they consume IT services, but not all cloud services from the various vendors are built with continuity and resiliency as a part of their core DNA,” said Jim Fanella, vice president, Workload and Cloud, HP Enterprise Services. “As we continue to grow our HP Helion managed portfolio of services, we believe that continuity should be a core feature for every business who utilizes the cloud and that clients should demand that their cloud partner needs to prepare them for the worst case scenario.”

To improve availability for clients and better address customer regional regulatory requirements, HP is providing this service from seven recovery centers across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific.