Hexagrid-Cobalt Disaster Recovery: True Business Continuity?

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) developer Hexagrid and disaster recovery (DR) specialist Cobalt Solutions are partnering on a cloud-based Disaster Recovery (DR) solution that will run on Hexagrid’s cloud computing platform.

According to the press release, the two companies are launching “the first ever cloud-based disaster recovery solution that offers true business continuity,” and the new DR service offers “businesses the most comprehensive opportunity to proceed with ‘business as usual’ when disaster strikes.”

What I don’t see in the press release — which is not to say the Hexagrid-Cobalt DR product isn’t a good one — is an attempt to substantiate those claims and differentiate the new solution from existing cloud-based DR. Hexagrid CEO Suresh Mandava continued in the same vein as the press release in his prepared statement: “Unlike the hosted data backup services being sold as cloud-based disaster recovery today, Cobalt is offering the only true opportunity for business continuity in the event of a disaster.”

That’s a bold statement.

I would like to know how the Hexagrid-Cobalt DR solution is different from–and for that matter superior to–cloud-based DR technologies already on the market. This contributing blogger hopes that the two companies can provide a response to that question.

The “About” section in the release mentions that Cobalt is located in Nevada, “away from natural disasters often experienced on the U.S. coast line,” which “provides a refuge in the desert when it comes to DR Services.” That geographic fact is worth considering, and Cobalt even has a dedicated 500-seat call center in Las Vegas for its DR customers, but how does the technology itself make the solution the only one offering “true business continuity”?

Here’s what Hexagrid’s CEO Suresh Mandava said in a prepared statement: “Cobalt proposed an exciting opportunity for Hexagrid to engineer another unique DR application of our Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing platform. Because of the uniquely extensive and complex network capabilities built into our platform, the Cobalt Solutions team can now assist their clients in establishing a cloud architecture that exactly replicates an existing production environment. Then, incremental backups of physical and virtual resources within the production environment populate a fully secure, fully operational cloud-based replica environment in one of Cobalt’s new data centers.”

I’m still not seeing the differentiator here. I hope either Hexagrid or Cobalt can provide me with the answer.

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