HP, Hitachi to offer disaster recovery services

Computerworld - Hewlett-Packard Co. yesterday said it has extended a multibillion-dollar reseller agreement with Hitachi Data Systems Corp. to continue offering Hitachi's high-end Lightning 9900 series array under the StorageWorks XP brand. The two storage giants also agreed to offer disaster recovery and business continuity systems and services together.
HP extended the reseller agreement through 2008. The partnership with Santa Clara, Calif.-based Hitachi had been set to expire in 2005.
Bob Schultz, senior vice president of HP's Network Storage Solutions division, wouldn't say how much the reseller agreement is worth, but said it will bolster a larger services strategy.
Hitachi's Freedom Storage 9900 array, also known as the "Lightning," features an internal switched-bus architecture that supplies bandwidth of up to 6.4GB/sec. and up to 147TB of capacity. HP loads its own management software onto the array. Both companies plan to use the Lightning array as the centerpiece of the disaster recovery and business continuity system they're now offering. That system will synchronously replicate between a primary and secondary site less than 60 miles apart and asynchronously replicate to a third array thousands of miles away.
The HP StorageWorks Multi-Site Disaster Tolerant Solution combines HP's software, networking, hardware and services with Hitachi's array to allow users to recover application processing in less than one hour should a local or regional disaster occur, Schultz said.
For Steve Strout, CIO of Morris Communications Corp. in Augusta, Ga., the services partnership between HP and Hitachi will speed the implementation of a disaster recovery system he plans to have in place by October for backing up his SAP and Exchange application servers.
Strout said that "one of the biggest benefits from this partnership" between HP and Hitachi is the ability to get the high-end Hitachi array without having to configure or download the HP replication software. "I want to have one relationship," he said. "This allows them to do system-to-system backups without me having to do a lot of systems administration. This provided me a much better and faster implementation."
Strout has so far purchased two StorageWorks XP arrays, each with 7TB of capacity, for business continuity. He plans on mirroring data between data centers in Augusta and Atlanta. Strout said he will eventually purchase a third array for disaster recovery.
Schultz said a three-site disaster recovery system will cost on average between $1.5 million and $3 million, depending on how the arrays and networks are configured.