Business Challenges

When the senior infrastructure engineer joined the company in 2018, he faced a daunting challenge: replace an aging VMware environment and storage resources from multiple vendors with a future-ready infrastructure to support the company’s rapid growth. In addition to the company’s corporate headquarters and primary data center in one state location, the company had a production facility and a secondary data center/disaster recovery (DR) location in another US state.

The IT director had established the goal of achieving “six nines” availability for all critical systems and data, while improving user experience and scaling to meet the quickly expanding volume of data.

“In addition, our in-house development team needed the capability to rapidly restore their development environments back to a particular point in time,” the senior infrastructure engineer says. “Achieving these goals just wasn’t possible with our legacy infrastructure.”

Improving backup and recovery was a critical success factor and the company’s previous solution just wasn’t up to the task.

Solution

To achieve its goals, the company’s IT team decided to implement Nutanix for all of the company’s data center applications and storage. But what about backup?

“The Nutanix sales engineer recommended HYCU due to its tight integration with Nutanix,” the senior infrastructure engineer recalls. “All the features of HYCU, plus the people I worked with at HYCU, made the decision easy.”

The company deployed 16 Nutanix nodes; eight nodes each in the primary and secondary data centers. Soon after, they added a cluster of storage-heavy Nutanix 8155 nodes for use as a dedicated backup and disaster recovery cluster.

Using HYCU, the IT team established protection domains, which take snapshots to the DR cluster. Critical applications are replicated every minute and all other replications hourly. “I use the HYCU ROBO feature to back up all replicated snapshots from the production clusters and use that for a backup target. Backups are written immediately to our S3 cloud storage,” the senior infrastructure engineer explains.

Benefits

Radically improved capabilities

HYCU provides all the performance and streamlined simplicity advantages of Nutanix. “I was able to take a hodge-podge of platforms and move to a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and create a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy, with minutely replications offsite. This was not even close to possible before we implemented Nutanix and HYCU,” the senior infrastructure engineer says.

Hassle-free scalability

HYCU simplifies the process of scaling to accommodate growth. “We have more than quadrupled our required resources in the past year,” the senior infrastructure engineer notes. “With HYCU, the ability to add new nodes quickly, easily and cost-effectively has been amazing.”

Time-saving simplicity

“I’ve worked with many other backup vendors and I really appreciate the simplicity that HYCU brings to the table,” the senior infrastructure engineer says, noting as an example HYCU’s high degree of automation. “The fact that you can have a policy that once a VM is created, it’s automatically protected, is really big.”

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About the customer

For this manufacturer of innovative building products, the company’s advanced technology
was used to make commercial and industrial workplaces more environmentally optimized.