Why the Right Choice of Backup for VMware and Nutanix Makes a Difference

Customers continue to look for ways to simplify their datacenter operations.

They typically do this in two ways:

1. Reduce complexity and operational cost by consolidating and eliminating too many moving parts, and
2. Increase agility by choosing solutions that allow for modular growth, i.e., an infrastructure that will allow them to grow gradually and scale as their business needs evolve.

These were at the heart of what made Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) such an attractive solution. In many ways, it was a perfect innovation by Nutanix, and VMware was very quick to follow-up with its vSAN offering. Now, both solutions combined own over two-thirds of the HCI Market!  

To help customers take advantage of HCI and the latest innovations from VMware, HYCU is proud to be the only solution in the market that has been purpose-built to be best in category for each of these platforms.

When you simplify your datacenter operations by deploying the latest solutions from Nutanix or VMware, you also want to reduce unnecessary complexity within the supporting infrastructure, including your data protection tools. The challenge of using traditional data protection tools that were built pre-HCI is that they were architected and created at a time when infrastructure is in many ways nothing more than a “dumb” server - not as smart as what is available with HCI today. So, backup and recovery software had to be built for the lowest common denominator.

This was a fundamental difference in how we architected and created data protection solutions for Nutanix and VMware environments.

We made the conscious decision to build for smart infrastructures like what HCI was delivering. We did this in two major ways:

1. We made our system dramatically more lightweight so customers can eliminate heavy data protection infrastructure. HYCU can get the best out of each system we support by making it easy to scale on the fly. We also eliminated the use of agents. HYCU is 100% agent-free.
2. Backup is important, but recovery is the key. While our backup service has many cool and impressive capabilities, the best part is recovery speed. When we tell a customer that the system has been recovered to a state they want, we want them to run at full speed. A number of legacy and alternate backup solutions say they have “instant” recovery, but the analogy is like the spare tire in your car – you may be able to use it to keep your car moving but performance will suffer. You can only drive on the spare for a limited time and you can’t go full speed again until you can get a new tire. IN the same way, “this so called “instant recovery” allows you to run recovery operations, but not at full speed and in many cases it takes a lot more to bring the system back to the fully recovered state. HYCU is the only solution that can take advantage of the native intelligence of the platforms we protect to let the customer run at full speed right after recovery! 

But it doesn’t stop there. As more and more businesses look to take advantage of hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, both Nutanix and VMware vSAN have evolved to provide their customers with a way to run these workloads within their public cloud of choice. One of the best things about running Nutanix and VMware vSAN in the public cloud is that it allows customers to take advantage of their existing knowledge and provides a way to efficiently use the public cloud infrastructure. The key word here though is to do this “efficiently.” To support this though, means that customers need a data protection solution that is lightweight, built for these platforms and allows them to move between these platforms and public clouds seamlessly. The lightweight, purpose-built, and intelligent nature of HYCU helps address this need across all major public clouds and storage infrastructure like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Wasabi. 

In addition, while Virtual Machines (VMs) are still the predominant enterprise workload today, the bulk of data actually resides in unstructured data repositories. The two largest providers of Enterprise Grade filesystems are Dell PowerScale (EMC Isilon) and NetApp. HYCU provides a best in class, scalable data protection solution for both of these filesystems. Many customers ask, “Why is backup of a filesystem even necessary? Why not just use replication?” To start with, ransomware is on the rise and so is the number of bad actors.  If we didn’t have to worry about ransomware and bad actors, then it is likely that we might be able to live without a good backup solution for these systems. With the heightened risk of attacks, it is imperative that organizations protect as much of their data as possible, including data that resides within these filesystems. The biggest challenge customers face with large scale filesystem backup is the impact it creates on production systems and the time it takes to perform seemingly simple tasks. At HYCU, we are glad to report that we have addressed both issues for customers and have made sure they can get granular recovery without the pain of NDMP! 

If you are interested in checking out any of the above-mentioned capabilities, just go to  tryhycu.com and get the latest bits to experience the value for yourself. Read more about the latest update to HYCU's Private Cloud and Data Center offerings.