HP Critical Advantage (CA) Service is a comprehensive support solution designed to help businesses maximize their return on investment in complex infrastructure that supports critical applications. CA offers an integrated set of proactive and reactive services designed to help you improve performance, availability, and functional use of your technology.

CA includes proactive and reactive support for the products in your IT environment. CA is purchased and entitled on a per-product basis, and you have the flexibility of choosing the appropriate hardware reactive support level, depending on your needs. In addition, each CA service level provides reactive software support and updates for HP software and the third-party software you’ve purchased from HP.

CA provides an assigned account team composed of highly trained IT professionals who form close working relationships with designated members of your IT management staff. The account team develops a clear understanding of your IT environment, your IT goals, and your overall business objectives. A mutually agreed-upon support strategy is then designed and documented in an account support plan. The account team meets with you annually to discuss progress against the plan and to update the plan in order to track continued alignment with your business goals. In addition, your assigned account team is equipped with HP developed remote support technologies and tools to help you minimize downtime and improve productivity.

In a complex environment, many components need to work seamlessly together. CA has been specifically designed for this purpose. It provides an end-to-end environment support solution covering servers, operating systems, hypervisors, storage, storage area networks (SANs), and networks. CA provides proactive deliverables across the components in the infrastructure supported by CA to help you achieve maximum utilization, uptime, and use of the technology by addressing the most common challenges in managing these environments. CA provides a core set of proactive services for your IT environment. CA also includes flexible proactive service credits that grow as your total investment in the CA Service grows within your IT environment. The account team will then use these credits to provide further proactive services that are selected for your IT environment based on your specific needs. Also, you have the option of purchasing additional CA proactive service credits, in case you need additional proactive services to be performed by the account team.

CA includes reactive support for your hardware and software, as well. When problems occur, you will receive rapid response from the HP Global Mission Critical Solution Center (GMCSC), whose staff members are trained to provide advanced technical support and are familiar with your specific IT environment. For hardware issues, the GMCSC will dispatch trained hardware specialists to resolve incidents on site, if required.