Late last year (2014) we announced a joint partnership with HP to develop a new Disaster Recovery as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution based on HP Helion cloud. The joint venture is publicly known as “HP Helion and Veritas Continuity”. We will walk through the key value propositions of the solution in multiple episodes. Today we shall take a quick tour of the Management Experience of the solution.
The Cloud Arena today
With the advent of cloud technologies, existing datacenters will continue to be relevant, enterprises are in need of implementing hybrid cloud. These cloud offerings promise to optimize CAPEX-OPEX and also provide recovery solutions. At the same time business demands have gone stricter. SLA’s drive the operational margins
Additionally there are multiple business application tiers (physical/virtual) operating in cohesion that need to scale to meet newer demands. Managing these applications call for a unified management solution to simplify day-to-day operations. Since the existing datacenters will continue to be relevant, enterprises are in need of implementing hybrid cloud. Also the reduced budget and resources are here to stay enforcing “Pay-per-use” model for the solutions.
Introducing HP Helion and Veritas Continuity
“HP Helion and Veritas Continuity” provides a scalable platform to build recovery solutions across data centers specific to the business needs. The solution is built to serve the unmet needs of today’s hybrid environments. It enables you to manage disaster recovery of your assets from on-premises datacenter to HP continuity cloud (Helion). The solution is backed with a proprietary replication technology to effectively move data from on-premises datacenter to cloud.
The solution will be delivered to customers in partnership with HP and will follow the “as-a-service” model. The representation depicts a typical delivery model that provides virtual machines or application disaster recovery as a service.
In this article we would touch upon the Simplified management of the solution.
Management Experience
The management capabilities of HP Helion and Veritas Continuity solution are
The remaining part of the article covers a high level deployment and asset management experience of the solution.
Virtual Appliance based Deployment
The HP Helion and Veritas Continuity solution deployment spans across the on-premises datacenter(s) of the customer and the HP Helion public cloud. The components are deployed using Virtual Appliances (VA’s) on the cloud as well as in the customer datacenter. The appliance model assures minimal install effort on the part of end user and is one of the key aspects of “as a service” solution.
To setup a component, user needs to instantiate the Virtual Appliance, bring it up on network and complete the bootstrap configuration wizard. The supported hyper visors for VA deployments are VMware, HyperV and KVM.
Single Pane of Glass
The management console of the solution is hosted in the cloud and is the single interface for all management and recovery operations. The landing page of the solution provides an elaborate view of the entire DR configuration. The datacenters are precisely plotted on the world map and relevant health status of the assets within each datacenter is displayed along with. The RPO/RTO status is also provided on the same page, ensuring all the critical information is accessible upfront. There are quick links to the most frequent actions performed by the user (e.g. Manage Assets), events and alerts recorded across datacenters.
Ease of Asset Management
The solution has an effective discovery capability, that discovers the assets hosted in the on-premises datacenter. Assets could be virtual machines, applications, business services or even physical machines. Once the assets are discovered, these can be grouped based on business needs and can be operated on at a group level.
Such groups are termed as Resiliency Groups (RG). A Resiliency Group can be of Virtual Machine or Application type. The RG can be used to perform a Start-Stop operation on the assets, where a Start would imply power on the group of VM or bring up the group of applications. Eventually, the same RG can be protected by configuring for Disaster Recovery. The DR configuration for an RG ensures that the entire group of assets can be recovered in the cloud.
Managing Business Services
HP Helion and Veritas Continuity has support for multi-tier applications also termed as Virtual Business Service (VBS). This feature helps creation of a VBS by a ‘drag and drop’ experience and the dependencies between the tiers are honored when any recovery or management operation is performed.
These are few of the features of the solution and more of these will be covered in later posts on the topic.