theCUBE Live At HP Discover 2014

Hewlett-Packard Co. yesterday unveiled a series of enhancements to the disaster recovery component of its OpenStack-powered public cloud portfolio that are designed to make it easier for organizations to protect data stored on some of their less accessible – but nonetheless critical – systems.

The Helion Continuity Services bundle can help cut between 15 and 50 percent of data protection costs and reduce the time it takes to recover from an outage by as much as 90 percent compared to on-premise environments, HP claimed. The latest updates extends that value proposition to Oracle Real Application Clusters, or RACs. Those are high-availability deployments of the database maker’s software that are considerably more expensive than standard installations and that typically power only the most mission-critical processes within an organization.

HP isn’t putting all of its eggs in one basket. Besides RAC configurations, Helion Continuity Services has also been configured to work with bare-metal Linux servers and storage-area networks. Additionally, the update adds enhanced support for Active Directory and the snapshotting capabilities of HP’s 3PAR family, giving users of the array series more flexibility in how they restore their environments.

For applications that have to be continuously backed up, the company is rolling out the option to deploy a dedicated hypervisor for real-time replication, which makes HP’s offer more appealing for higher sensitivity services like the kind deployed on Oracle RAC. Finally, the upgrade brings with it the ability to provision extra storage capacity on demand ahead of a recovery to address unexpected changes in workload requirements.

There’s a reason why HP is prioritizing disaster recovery. While more competitive on pricing, Amazon Web Services, the dominant name in the public cloud, doesn’t yet provide a purpose-built offering for backing up corporate data. That’s the same vulnerability VMware inc. is trying to exploit with its vCloud Air Data Protection offering, which has the advantage of being interoperable with on-premise virtual environments. HP is apparently hoping to offset that edge by offering support for more types of infrastructure, but only time will tell how successful that strategy will be.

The updated Helion Continuity Services suite is available immediately from seven recovery centers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific.