To say that Hewlett-Packard Co.’s acquisition of Autonomy didn’t go smoothly would be a tremendous understatement, but three years, an $8.8 billion writedown and several lawsuits later, the deal is paying dividends. That  accomplishment didn’t come for free: it’s the result of HP overcoming the many potholes that sprung up on the road to the acquisition and successfully incorporating the British analytics powerhouse into its organizational structure, according to Jeff Veis, the vice president of marketing for the division.

Veis dropped by SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE for his first time at the company’s recently concluded Discover conference together with repeat guest Stephen Spellicy, the director HP’s data protection software business,  a part of the Autonomy unit, to discuss the products of that merger with host Dave Vellante. The latest on the list is the recently announced Data Protector 9.0, the newest version of the company’s flagship backup and recovery platform.

The release marks the second step in HP’s Adaptive Backup and Recovery vision, Spellicy detailed, a four-part roadmap that was originally announced last November. The end goal is to transform data protection from the chore it has historically been regarded by organizations to be into a source of business value. He said that Autonomy’s analytics software is what allows the company to deliver the data insights needed to make that happen.

“We can capture that entire conversation and then iterate all the information we learn about that conversation to improve and dynamically optimize backups,” Spellicy elaborated. “So we tell that story, we show it in demos to customers, they connect the dots and they see the value immediately.”

Prioritization

The capabilities included under the Adaptive Backup and Recovery umbrella can be broken down to four categories that  map out to the  stages of HP’s product delivery lifecycle. The first is what Spellicy refers to as “prioritization”, or resource allocation, which involves identifying the requirements of specific workloads and provisioning infrastructure and services accordingly. That task is much harder to accomplish than it was in previous decades, Veis reflected, when data centers were  much more homogeneous than they are today and most mission-critical information was kept within the four walls of the organization.

“Business-critical stuff was in the data center and the further you got out to the edge, the importance goes down; you lose a laptop here or there, it’s okay. Nobody is saying that anymore: often your most critical data is at your edge and the stuff that’s in your data center is still important, but not the most timely needed information,” he said.

Prediction

The second ingredient is “prediction”, the forecasting features introduced with Data Protector 9.0. Spellicy said that the new version proactively identifies areas of improvement by scanning historical patterns for common patterns that may be useful for streamlining operations.

“We can look at typical backup jobs and look at the typical backup jobs and the results of those sessions and then, using our analytics, predict a best effort RTO [recovery point objective]  that an IT director or backup admin can utilize and say ‘look, the best I can get on recovering this mission-critical app is from yesterday at this point in time’ and it’s gonna take this amount of time to recover,” he detailed.

Filling in the blanks

The remaining pieces of HP’s Adaptive Backup and Recovery puzzle, “recommendation” and automation”, are still in the works. But Veis said his company has already given customers the means to take their data protection initiatives to the next level in the form of two companion services it released for the latest version of Data Protector.

The first, Backup Navigator, is a reporting tool that is similarly powered by Autonomy and packs over 90 pre-prepared dashboard ranging in type from historical to real-time to predictive, Veis highlighted. According to HP, the software provides visual visibility into backup infrastructure changes at the organizational level as well a real-time view of technical problems and operational metrics such as performance, deduplication ratios and media quality. Plus, it packs social networking features that allow users to share reports with their peers directly from the program interface instead of having to open another tab.

The other service is the Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) Data Pack, which extends Adaptive Backup and Recovery to Windows environments. The extension underscores HP’s goal of integrating Autonomy into the entire information management lifecycle and empowering customers to gain a deeper understanding of their environments, Veis said, knowledge that ultimately translates into better decisions.

“What we’re trying to do within HP Software is connect those pieces. So many other vendors in the industry look at those in nice little silos and that doesn’t address what you’re trying to do, you have to look at the whole. We want people to look at the whole elephant, not just the trunk or the tusks,” he concluded.

photo credit: Peter Kurdulija via photopin cc