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By Laton McCartney
HP isn't touting its just announced solution for backing up and recovering data from notebooks and PCs as a key component of its cloud computing strategy, but it concedes that the offering provides a hook into the cloud.
Called the HP Data Protection Notebook Extension, the new offering is intended to serve as the PC equivalent of the vendor's well-established HP Data Protector software. "HP Protector has been around for 20 years," Shari Cravens, worldwide product marketing manager for data protection at HP, told CIOZone. "We have 35,000 enterprise customers."
Eighteen months in development, the new service is targeted at the exploding mobile workforce. "Employees are increasingly storing data outside the corporate network on their personal hard drives," said Bard Vincent, an HP product manager. "Consequently, protecting data on notebooks has become a business imperative."
HP is introducing the product at a time when an estimated 25 percent of the workforce is currently mobile, Cravens explained. In addition, employees are increasingly saving vital company information outside of corporate networks, with more than 4,000 business files stored on the average PC. The upshot: Organizations can face dramatic business risks if this critical data is lost through hard-drive failures or accidental file deletions. "The cost of data loss can be potentially more than $400,000 annually for an average-size business with 5,000 users," Cravens asserted.
Vincent said the new offering is aimed at both the enterprise and SMB market. "The concept is to extend the laptop to the data center on an ongoing basis and provide continuous file protection, offline or online."
With the new solution, HP provides laptop and PC users with internal backup capabilities for their computers so local data is always protected even when a user is working offline. Data is instantly captured and backed up automatically each time a user changes, creates or receives a files. This information is then stored temporarily in a local repository pending transfer to the network data vault for full backup and restore capabilities. HP provides the local repository for each customer PC or laptop. Cost is a one-time charge of $2,500 for a 100 client pack and $20,000 for a 1,000 client pack, Vincent said.
Businesses, HP claims, can reduce technology costs and increase employee productivity with the solution's continuous file protection, which provides nonstop, transparent and automated protection for information created locally. With single-click recovery, users can recover their own files without initiating help desks calls, thereby minimizing the burden on IT resources.
Businesses also can maximize bandwidth efficiency and better ensure security of information through HP Data Protector Notebook Extension's deduplication, data encryption and compression techniques. The user's storage footprint is reduced by deduplication of multiple copies of data. All of the user's data is then stored, encrypted and compressed, and the expired versions are cleaned up.
The same team that developed this offering is currently working on new laptop and PC protection platforms for Mac Office, and, yes, cloud computing, said Vincent.
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