Hewlett-Packard Co. and Symantec are partnering to offer a disaster-recovery-as-a-service solution and are looking for partners to join its beta program, to be unveiled mid-2015.
The data recovery service is based on HP Helion OpenStack and Symantec Continuity, and is meant to provide a step up from existing cloud backup solutions.
“When you look at the concept of an outage, most people think of that smoking crater; you’ve had a flood, you had a data centre fire, and you have this absolute view of ‘everything is gone,’” said Alex Froyo, senior director of strategy and operations at Hewlett-Packard. He explained that despite the “disaster recovery” in the solution’s name, it’s meant to eliminate downtime from a broad range of recoveries, including at the single server level.
The new solution differs from traditional cloud backup solutions in two key ways, according to Froyo. First, it uses a “replication engine” to constantly upload data to the cloud as opposed to periodically. Second, it has the ability to restore operating systems and applications in addition to files and folders.
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When used in traditional IT systems, the entirely software-based engine will stay on the client’s side, and is continuously “looking at the health and state of the server that is being protected, and grabbing the information from the server [including] the system state, the operating system, the essence of the server and the data and sending it to the cloud,” said Froyo.
When the service is fully launched in late 2015, it will also have the ability to run on HP Helion OpenStack-based cloud environments. According to Froyo, HP is also considering other cloud providers for the service.
Once launched, both Symantec and HP will be selling the solution together. While the solution is being co-developed by the two companies, “Symantec provides the DRaaS software solution, while HP provides the end-to-end service based on the underlying disaster recovery facilities, infrastructure, and operations team,” according to HP’s official press release.
While developers are still fleshing out the details of the beta program, Froyo said that the companies will target a wide range of sectors and geographies, including consumer goods, manufacturing, transportation and finance in North America, Europe and Asia/Pacific.
“The ability for customers to access your data or your applications not only through the internet, client connections, but also through mobile devices has raised the need for data to be available with no downtime,” said Froyo. “The value of data has exponentially grown.”