Business Challenge‍

Serving the academic needs of approximately 1,000 students and more than 120 faculty and staff keeps the school’s small team of two IT professionals busy. The last thing they need are technologies that add complexity to their environment.

That’s why they decided to migrate from their existing hypervisor with SAN-based environment over to Nutanix AHV.

To satisfy the school’s backup and recovery needs, they had been using one of the market leading hypervisor backup solutions. The solution was in the process of adding support for Nutanix AHV, Chevalier ICT Manager Adrian Burgess says, “When we saw that the support for Nutanix AHV was in its infancy, we had to look at other options.” Chevalier’s Nutanix solutions provider, Qirx, recommended Burgess take a look at HYCU. “They said you’d be crazy not to.” 

Solution

To support the move to Nutanix AHV, the Chevalier IT team evaluated other solutions for the backup of Nutanix AHV, including HYCU. The clear winner was HYCU due to its tight integration with Nutanix AHV and the simplified operation that enables.

“We’re always trying to simplify the management of our infrastructure. If we can reduce the time we spend doing that, it’s fantastic,” Burgess says. “HYCU sounded very simple and it turned out to be very simple. We had HYCU deployed, configured and running in under 45 minutes.”

Chevalier chose HYCU to handle all backup and recovery of its Nutanix environment, encompassing 60 VMs handling a variety of workloads, from terminal services and Windows applications to web services and SQL databases.

Building on that success, Burgess is now looking at Nutanix Files as a solution for retiring the school’s Windows-based virtual file services. HYCU will play a key role, simplifying backup and recovery for two three-node Nutanix clusters, with one functioning as a disaster recovery cluster. 

Benefits

Easy Deployment

HYCU can be deployed in Nutanix environments with incredible speed—often just minutes—and surprising ease. “HYCU is the simplest backup software I’ve ever deployed,” Chevalier’s Burgess says.

Simple Management

The HYCU interface integrates seamlessly with the Nutanix interface, with the same look and feel, and consistent operation. “I can’t always be there, so I need an interface that I can easily walk someone through over the phone,” Burgess says, pointing to HYCU’s simple operation. “Some of the other backup and recovery options we looked at required specialised skillsets.”

Rapid Recovery

Burgess says data restoration speed has been fantastic. “Something that would have taken us half a day to restore before takes just half an hour with HYCU,” Burgess says, noting that this is especially important for an institution like Chevalier with a small IT department.

About the customer

Chevalier College is a Catholic coeducational secondary day school located in New South Wales, Australia. For more than 70 years, the school has served students and families seeking academic growth in a culture grounded in heart spirituality.