HP has announced a new support solution focused on clients running business-critical applications on virtualized HP ProLiant servers in an effort to improve performance and availability while reducing costs. The new HP Critical Advantage service provides users with an assigned problem resolution and process improvement support team tasked with maintaining uptime in business-critical virtualized environments.

HP Critical Advantage is billed as the "first comprehensive service" offering from a major technology vendor that delivers support for business-critical applications in virtualized x86 environments. The company insists that as more organizations implement business-critical applications on virtualized x86 servers, the need to avoid unplanned downtime while accelerating performance has increased.

HP Critical Advantage services are intended to maintain client uptime by offering support levels based on needs and budget. "As enterprises virtualize their industry-standards-based environments to control costs and gain flexibility, they are realizing the vast complexities the technology can introduce," said Matt Healey, research manager, software and hardware support services, IDC.

HP new solution comprises the following elements:

• The HP Global Mission Critical Solution Center focused on reducing the frequency and duration of outages by providing rapid reactive support and incident resolution for complex business-critical environments.
• A defined set of proactive services based on industry best practices for change management and process improvement helps prevent unplanned downtime by anticipating potential issues.
• HP Critical Advantage Flexible Proactive Services, which includes performance & capacity analysis for virtual environments to guide clients on virtualization capacity planning to align performance with business demands — and also, a virtualization readiness workshop for critical applications to provide infrastructure planning and assessment that help clients quickly achieve virtualization’s benefits while mitigating potential risks.