Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Tarsus Distribution join forces to deliver new cloud offering

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced that it is partnering with Tarsus Distribution, one of the leading distributors in South Africa, to create a compliant, agile and affordable Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution. HPE will provide a modern and secure private cloud infrastructure, based on HPE compute, storage, networking, and software solutions, including ransomware protection and disaster recovery capabilities from Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

According to a 2023 briefing by the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, South Africa is the eighth most targeted country in the world for ransomware, costing the South African economy an estimated 2.2bn ZAR ($120m) per year. At the same time, businesses still have to deal with an ongoing energy crisis with an estimated total cost of somewhere between 204m ZAR ($11m) and 899m ZAR ($49.8m) per day.

Combined with unpredictable events like undersea cable failures, this has created a perfect storm, emphasising how important it is for South African organisations to have business continuity measures and backup and recovery solutions in place. The new DRaaS offering from Tarsus and HPE focuses on that exact point, providing access to disaster recovery capabilities with real-time protection, near-zero data loss and application downtime. Low recovery point objectives (RPOs) and fast recovery time objectives (RTOs) will help mitigate the impact of potential risk events – be it natural disasters, outages or cyberattacks.

“For several years now, local businesses have been experiencing increasing pressure on their business continuity plan infrastructure, with no end to the trend in sight,” said Gary Pickford, managing director at Tarsus. “Together with HPE we developed a new, affordable solution that addresses exactly these needs and concerns, enhancing our efforts to provide the best possible service, support, and overall solutions to the reseller channel and Small and Medium-sized Business (SMB) customers in the region – at the lowest possible cost.”

“As the oldest IT distribution company in South Africa, Tarsus is a key distribution partner for HPE, possessing vast experience, the trust of the reseller community, continuously supporting its development, and a profound understanding of the needs and wants of the end-customers,” said President Ntuli, managing director for South Africa, HPE. “This makes them the perfect partner to address the increasing disaster recovery and cyber recovery requirements of organisations in the region. Based on Zerto’s leading solution for DRaaS, this new offering will allow organisations to simplify their recovery plan, benefiting from Zerto’s always-on, continuous data protection and replication.”  

This is complemented by a dedicated training scheme with HPE experts, supporting about 50 new roles Tarsus created to aid the new offering, providing essential know-how around the private cloud infrastructure and Zerto capabilities, and nurturing skillsets. Building on this, Tarsus will provide training for partners, delivering on their commitment to drive the development of the reseller community and their technical skills and to optimally support its partners and SMB customers in their growth.