Optimized Nutanix Remote/Branch Office (ROBO) Data Backup and Recovery

ROBO Sites on the Rise

The demise of the brick-and-mortar store has been predicted since the advent of the internet and e-commerce. Like many such predictions, it hasn’t come to pass. In fact, enterprise remote office/branch offices (ROBO), retail locations, and regional offices are essential to doing business anywhere, anytime. Not surprisingly, customers have the same expectations for ROBO sites as they do for online or a centralized location. This means IT has increased challenges around high-performance, cost-effective and secure ROBO operations, including all-important data protection.

One-click ROBO Data Protection and Disaster Recovery

One of the common areas of investment for data center modernization is improving backup and recovery, for sites of all sizes. Nutanix is the leading enterprise cloud platform and comes with efficient replication and DR capabilities between the ROBO and data center with an application-consistent replica of data, which matches the one in the data center. Unlike typical ROBO solutions that offer little more than legacy products packaged into a single chassis or cabinet and require time-consuming onsite IT for deployment, Nutanix is a software-driven architecture that streamlines installation and optimizes ongoing performance.

As previously covered on our blog, HYCU Data Protection for Nutanix provides the most efficient protection of ROBO. But, to learn more, keep reading on why HYCU for Nutanix is not only efficient, but optimized to be the only purpose-built, data protection for Nutanix AHV and ESX clusters in remote office/branch offices.

The beauty of Nutanix is that it can be consistently deployed across traditional on-premises enterprise data centers, remote office/branch office and disaster recovery (DR) sites, and public clouds. This enables application mobility across the cloud without lock-in to a hardware, hypervisor, or cloud vendor.

The newest node offering allows remote office IT locations to harness the power of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud and simplifies remote IT infrastructure so that it can now be managed centrally with a single pane of glass. The solution allows you to deploy Nutanix as a cluster of one or two nodes that can run all of a remote office’s local applications and services including security-focused virtual appliances. The ROBO solutions comes prepackaged with AHV and can also support ESXi.

From faster and streamlined deployments to simplified management, remote locations can now use Nutanix to run nearly any workload while lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO). Nutanix is committed to offering flexible consumption models, so the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud for remote offices will also be available from the various OEM partners and as software-only deployments.

The Next Level of Nutanix ROBO Data Protection

Nutanix provides an efficient, integrated ROBO disaster recovery solution that replicates data to the central location and enables efficient VM failover. But HYCU for Nutanix—data protection designed specifically for Nutanix—takes it one step further and lets you fully leverage your Nutanix investment, both from an efficiency and cost perspective. HYCU enables backup of the ROBO data from data center replicas and requires zero resources on the ROBO and network side. HYCU enables one-click recovery within the datacenter or at any remote location.

In addition to one-click recovery, HYCU for Nutanix offers additional layers of protection (backup copies) to non-Nutanix storage (part of the 3-2-1 best practice). HYCU enables VM or file-level, admin or tenant-level recovery within the data center or on the remote site.

Big Benefits of HYCU for Nutanix for ROBO

This approach is simple and cost-effective because no additional ROBO staff, infrastructure or bandwidth is required. The flexibility to use existing infrastructure combined with the speed at which branch solutions can be provisioned at a central location in under an hour then shipped ready to run accelerates time to value even further.

Here’s an illustration of how it works.

HYCU Supports ESX Clusters as well as Nutanix AHV for ROBO

HYCU stands out from other companies in how it supports ESX. HYCU provides the Application/VM level view to the end user, and leverages the storage level snapshots for backup instead of the classic hypervisor level snapshots on Nutanix.

Benefits of using storage-level snapshots for backup include:

• Gets rid of the problem of VM Stun.
• Eliminates impact on the production application. This not only reduces the overall business impact, but it also allows customers to reduce the safety buffer they plan to use in their production environment and factor in the impact created by the backup.
• Maximizes the ROI for any company’s Nutanix Investment. Unlike all other backup vendors, HYCU for Nutanix is the only solution that leverages Nutanix’s snapshots not just for backup, but also for recovery. This means you don’t require separate infrastructure for “instant” or “rapid” recovery.

HYCU Expands Support to non-Nutanix Environments

HYCU was initially focused on tackling VM backups in Nutanix environments. It started out by protecting VMs running on Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) environments and then expanded to protect VMs running on ESX in Nutanix environments.

Today HYCU takes a logical and necessary leap to ensure its VM-centric backup software finds a home in a broader number of enterprises. While HYCU for Nutanix may arguably do the best job of any backup software product available when it comes to protecting VMs in Nutanix environments, most organizations do not yet host all their VMs on Nutanix.

To address this larger market, HYCU has broadened its capabilities to tackle the protection of VMs on non-Nutanix platforms. Up to this point, HYCU leveraged the native data protection capabilities found on Nutanix’s platform to negate the possibility of VM stuns. This approach worked whether it protected VMs running on AHV or ESX as both were hosted on the Nutanix platform and HYCU could call on Nutanix’s native snapshot capabilities.

By enabling its software to protect VMs running on non-Nutanix platforms, HYCU for Nutanix by necessity must use the native VMware APIs for Data Protection (VADP) to protect these VMs.  This method of data protection allows for snapshots at the VM level. As VADP does not offer the same level of data protection against VM stuns that the native Nutanix platform offers, users on non-Nutanix platforms remain exposed to the possibility of VM stuns.

That said, organizations do gain three advantages by using HYCU on non-Nutanix platforms:

• They obtain a common solution to protect VMs on both their Nutanix and non-Nutanix platforms. HYCU provides them with one interface to manage the protection of all VMs.
• Affordable VM backups. HYCU prices its backup software very aggressively with attractive list prices
• They can more easily move VMs from non-Nutanix to Nutanix platforms. Once they begin to protect VMs on non-Nutanix platforms, they can restore them to Nutanix platforms. Once moved, they can replace the VM’s underlying data protection methodology with Nutanix’s native data protection capabilities to negate the possibility of VM stuns.

In today’s highly virtualized world a virtualization centric backup software play may seem late to market. However, backup software consolidations and mergers coupled with the impact that hyper-converged infrastructures are having on enterprise data centers have created an opening for an affordable virtualization centric backup software play.

HYCU has rightfully discerned such an opportunity exists. By now extending the capabilities of its product to protect non-Nutanix environments, it both knocks down the barriers and objections for these environments to adopt its software while simultaneously easing their path to eventually transition to Nutanix and address the VM stun challenges that persist in non-Nutanix environments.

Transformation Matters

The simplicity that HYCU offers for Nutanix and non-Nutanix environments is essential to successfully transforming your ROBO environment. Why? As cloud-based applications in ROBO environments grow, complexity can be introduced as increased cloud usage leads to challenges around data protection, governance and management complexity. HYCU for ROBO is a software-driven solution that simplifies IT management and allows you to focus on enhancing the user experience, improving application performance, and delivering innovative services more reliably than in a traditional ROBO IT environment.

We are committed to delighting our customers and here to help you. Let’s talk about how we can modernize data protection and address your business needs. You can try HYCU or contact us at info@hycu.com.