Hewlett-Packard has upgraded its Helion cloud by adding disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) to the offering.

The DRaaS capability is included in HP’s Helion Continuity Services, as the tech giant seeks to provide a high level of availability for enterprise customers’ mission-critical workloads.

And the firm claims the new feature speeds recovery time by up to 90%, reduces data loss by up to 95% and cuts costs by between 15% and 50% thanks to its as-a-service pricing model.

The new addition comes as part of a wider update to Helion Continuity Services, which offers backup to customers’ workloads run on-premise private clouds, traditional hosting environments or on Helion’s own managed virtual private cloud.

Oracle and Red Hat Linux

Alejandro Froyo, director of continuity services for HP, told CBR the latest version of HP Continuity would support Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, on top of existing support for physical and virtual Windows servers and Linux.

"Customers running on-premise or in cloud under Oracle RAC or using Red Hat clusters, they would be able to failover their clusters onto our cloud recovery infrastructure," he said. "And they would still have an Oracle RAC cluster on the DR side and still have the availability that comes from having a Red Hat Linux cluster."

This expanded support for Oracle RAC and Red Hat Linux would target ERP workloads and HR applications running in Oracle or MySQL databases, Froyo added.

Oracle late last month announced an improved cloud offering in which customers could switch native applications from on-premise into Oracle Cloud at the click of a button from any Oracle database.

Asked what would tempt Oracle customers over to Helion’s platform, Froyo cited Helion’s DRaaS ability to perform non-disruptive disaster recovery testing, where DR testing does not impact on production environments.

"This offers a non-disruptive level of testing, in an isolated environment. A customer can go ahead and do what they want without risking the corruption of their production," he said, adding that Helion DRaaS’s ability to backup data every 15 minutes means less data is lost if downtime occurs.

Snapshots and thin provisioning

Aside from the wider support for clusters, the latest additions to Helion Continuity leverage HP’s 3PAR technology to offer dynamic tuning of backup requirements, thin provisioning and data snapshots, on top of the existing ability to encrypt data at rest.

HP, which recently announced plans to split into two companies targeting PCs and printers, then servers, cloud, storage and networking respectively, has also included on-demand data storage.

Froyo said: "What we’ve noticed is a customer has a protected workload, and maybe what they require is an extra 50TB during rehearsals real quick because the batch processing overran. We’ve now created the ability to quickly add capacity for the customer’s continuity demands."

The DRaaS service already has a customer in the UK’s Paragon Community Housing Group.

Its head of IT, Barry Alford, said: "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.

"HP quickly implemented DRaaS, and helped us simplify and modernise our backup and continuity implementation while significantly improving our performance indicators."