The White Hat Approach to Data Protection

There are a lot of competing technologies in the industry that attempt to address the data protection challenges customers have.

What matters most to customers is the final solution, its value, adoptability and usability.

With HYCU, we believe in the art of subtraction.

You probably are wondering what that really means. We believe that traditional backup solutions in the market are way too complex, hard to adopt and typically require a boat load of folks to keep them up and running. So, we believe in eliminating unnecessary knobs in the UI, adding intelligence and not asking questions for which we can determine the answers using technology and also eliminating the need to purchase redundant hardware and software.

Because we are purpose-built for Nutanix, we leverage the Nutanix data protection layer providing optimal support for Nutanix customer’s existing investments.

The picture below outlines how we augment the Nutanix protection layer by providing enterprise class, complementary backup with compelling value add functionality to create the best in class data protection solution.

What Wearing the White Hat Means

At HYCU, we believe getting a customer to try our solution and earning their business is a privilege we need to earn.

When we win, we want to win on our merits. For two simple reasons. One, our CEO Simon Taylor always reminds us that we as a company want to take the White Hat Approach, i.e. be ethical, value your customer and be respectful to your competition. Two, winning in any other way is not a sustainable business model. Customers are very smart and they might get tricked once, but will never let you earn their business if they figure out you did it the wrong way. You might be wondering, why am I bringing this up now. Recently, I was with a customer and heard about the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) our competition was trying to create. We thought instead of just telling that one customer what the correct info is, we would tell the entire world via our blog.

• FUD #1: HYCU requires PowerShell to do file level restore. For a product like HYCU, where we win our customers based on simplicity, why would we make a day-to-day operation like file level restore only via PowerShell? The simple answer is, we do allow customers to use Rest APIs, CLIs and PowerShell, but our recommended method is to use our intuitive, simple to use UI. You can recover a single file/folder, entire VM, individual databases, point in time restores, entire Apps, everything via our UI.
• FUD #2: When you perform a restore of a VM, HYCU does not delete the old backups. Our engineering team has worked on eight different backup and recovery products in the market to date and has more than 20 years of developing enterprise backup and recovery products. After a restore of a virtual machine, HYCU labels the restore as a restored VM. The previous backups would expire based on the retention set in our simple to setup policies.
• FUD #3: HYCU is a VM and a single point of failure. HYCU is a virtual appliance, but people forget that we run on Nutanix, the best hyper-converged infrastructure in the market! The advantage of running on a clustered infrastructure is that we don’t have to worry about single node failures. When the node running HYCU goes down, Nutanix AOS takes care of moving HYCU. For disaster recovery (DR) purposes, again customers can leverage the power of Nutanix DR. For accidental VM deletion or corruption, etc. HYCU does the backup of its own image all the time and makes sure it keeps a ready to go image ready for recovery anytime that is needed. So, even in the worst case, you can get HYCU back up and running within minutes. At HYCU, we want to leverage great technology that already exists versus reinventing the wheel. As believers in the art of subtraction, why create tech for tech sake!
• FUD #4: HYCU can only backup Nutanix AHV. When we first released HYCU back in 2017, we started with just AHV, then we expanded to ESX on Nutanix, and in Q2 of this year, we did announce support for non-Nutanix ESX. We did this, because customers told us they want to use the same HYCU simplicity for their existing non-Nutanix workloads and then transition to Nutanix over time. In addition, HYCU also provides the most optimized, scale-out backup for Nutanix Files (formerly Nutanix AFS) & customers adopting Nutanix for Remote Office Branch Offices.

At the end of the day, regardless of what questions you may have about any product, we always encourage our customers and those interested in learning more about HYCU for Nutanix, to give it a try. Two ways to go about it. Send us your questions to info@hycu.com or get the 45-day Free Trial here. There is no substitute for real, hands-on experience.

We make that simple as well. You get a fully-functional 45-day trial with no obligation. You won’t be disappointed!

Try HYCU for free