Delivering Data Protection Innovation for Cloud on Your Terms

It’s been more than four years since we introduced the first release of HYCU.

Since then, we’ve been spending our time wisely aligning our innovation for customers and partners with the right engineering investments. This has enabled us to deliver the most relevant functionalities for the current and future use cases of backup, migration and DR. We’re extremely grateful to our growing customer base as well as the interest we continue to receive. We are sold in more than 78 countries and used by businesses in a variety of industry verticals. Coupled with our focus on customer delight, punctuated by our 91+ NPS (Net Promoter Score), and you have a recipe for success that speaks volumes about our passion for multi-cloud data protection. This week at Nutanix Global .NEXT Virtual Experience, Nutanix largest annual customer event, we are showcasing our latest innovation, HYCU for Enterprise Clouds (v4.3).

As a platinum sponsor, we are proud to share more on how we are helping Nutanix customers make cloud on their terms possible. 

With the latest innovation, there are three key areas: 

1. Enhancing Ransomware Recovery Readiness
2. Expanding Nutanix Platform Integration, and
3. Optimizing Backups to Public Clouds

 Here’s more on each area.

1.  Enhancing Ransomware Recovery Readiness

As we all know, the past eighteen months in particular has been challenging. The world has been grappling with a deadly pandemic has forced companies and IT organizations to adapt to a at home and remote working model. While this has become the new norm in many ways, it has also forced IT admins and security teams to reevaluate and reinforce their organizational security policies. As if dealing with a pandemic and a new way of working wasn’t hard enough, we were handed a new nightmare of rampant ransomware attacks. These attacks have become increasingly frequent, bold and indiscriminate in choosing victims. Depending on what site you choose to quote, a ransomware attack happens on average every 11 seconds, the average downtime after an attack occurs is 21 days and the list goes on.

That’s one reason why we introduced R-Score, a public service to determine how prepared you are to recover in the event of a ransomware attack, and another reason why with HYCU Protégé, we have developed several capabilities to drastically increase ransomware recovery readiness. This includes directly performing backups to WORM storage, providing air-gapped backup security and helping datacenters to quickly recover from ransomware attacks. With the latest innovations introduced with HYCU v4.3 we have further increased the effectiveness of ransomware recovery.

HYCU v4.3 introduces a set of detailed backup validation capabilities, where customers can now verify the validity of backups, copies and archives. Customers can now perform an elaborate process of backup validation with basic (such as VM power on and VM shut down) and advanced options (such as network operations, disk validation, custom script execution).

Fig 1: Showcasing advanced backup validation options

Customers can launch this process on demand, or simply automate it with HYCU’s validation policies.

In addition, HYCU can also provide the ability to detect abnormal change rates between backups. HYCU can now also detect and alert unnoticed open/public access to HYCU’s on-premises (NAS – NFS and SMB) and cloud-based (AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob) backup storage, which are prime targets for ransomware attacks.

Fig 2: Alert generated on a backup target that has public access

With HYCU’s new webhook based real-time notifications, Customers can now stay agile and responsive to ransomware-related threats. This can further strengthen the overall organizational security SLAs for ransomware detection and recovery.

Fig 3: HYCU’s new webhook capability

2. Expanding Nutanix Platform Integration

In 2017, when we released our first version of HYCU Data Protection for Nutanix platforms, we were the first to provide an enterprise-ready, purpose-built backup and recovery solution for Nutanix HCI. Today, HYCU Protégé has evolved into a comprehensive multi cloud data management solution and we still continue our tradition of being the first to support Nutanix platform’s latest and greatest features.

As you are probably aware, HYCU is the first and still the only solution to support application consistent backups of Nutanix Volume groups attached to Nutanix VMs. In addition to that, HYCU can now automatically discover, and backup independent volume groups that are not attached to any Nutanix VMs. This is very extremely useful to protect Nutanix Karbon’s containerized workloads and physical machines using iSCSI LUNs from Nutanix.

Fig 4: HYCU’s ability to protect independent Volume Groups that are not attached to VMs

HYCU now also opens its integration doors to Nutanix Era with HYCU’s backup disk inclusion capability. This is extremely helpful in avoiding backup of temporary disks that are dynamically attached to VM for Era’s operations. This is also in tandem to HYCU’s existing backup disk exclusion capability that aids in speeding up the backup completion times and save backup storage capacity by avoiding backups of unnecessary data.

Fig 5: HYCU’s “include” disk option, in addition to its existing “exclude” disk option

With HYCU’s existing reputation of offering high performance, secure and immutable backups to Nutanix Objects, HYCU now further simplifies the management of Nutanix Objects as a Backup Target. HYCU does this by automatically discovering Nutanix Objects clusters (or Nutanix Mine powered by Nutanix objects) with a simpler bespoke configuration and better visibility into Nutanix storage Nutanix Mine dashboard.

Fig 6: Nutanix Objects as a dedicated backup target

3. Optimizing backups to Public Clouds

HYCU Protégé is the first solution to offer a true zero backup footprint to all on-premises workloads.

This is due to two simple reasons. First, HYCU occupies an extremely small compute, memory and data storage footprint. Second, HYCU can perform primary (incremental) backups, secondary copies and archives directly to cloud storage. This is no easy feat as it takes a lot of engineering ingenuity to offer high performance backups to cheap and deep cloud storage.

With the latest version of HYCU, the concept of zero back footprint is further elevated. HYCU now transcends the limitation of streaming backups of VMs with vDisks greater than 5TB to object storage. This is a one of the most significant steps of HYCU’s technological advancement of being the ultimate cloud-native backup solution with no agents and plugins, while delivering high backup performance.

For customers who have cloud storage as a secondary backup target with limited bandwidth, HYCU now can further streamline the secondary copies with dedicated backup windows. This ensures the commencement of secondary backups at a more desired time range. With this and HYCU’s network throttling, HYCU customers can fully reap the benefits of cost-efficient cloud native backups with limited resources.

Fig 7: Option to specify desired schedule window for secondary copies

The other important aspect of achieving cost-efficient cloud native backups, is to keep unnecessary egress costs under control. This is why HYCU now offers an intuitive way of negating egress IOPs while performing secondary copies of primary backup that are already on the cloud.

The cost-efficiency of HYCU doesn’t just stop with backups, but also continues with restore operations from the cloud. By simply marking the new metered-option on a cloud-backup storage, HYCU avoids unnecessary retrieval of data from public cloud whenever possible during a restore operation.

Summary

As always, a single blog post doesn’t do justice to the amount of engineering ingenuity that went into delivering the latest version of HYCU. We're also proud of how HYCU is now the only data protection provider to have a Security Technical Information Guides (STIG) from DISA. STIGs are a real and important guide in helping prevent cyberattacks for both the federal government and commercial organizations. More details are available at the following link on our DISA STIG.

Stop by our Virtual Booth to ask one of our experts to see what the latest version of HYCU looks like. Experience it firsthand. Or you can sign up for our latest version at tryhycu.com. If you’re interested in learning more about R-Score, you can check out the HYCU On-demand session with our VP Products Subbiah Sundaram and Senior Sales Engineer Jason Dalessio on ransomware recovery or learn more at www.getrscore.org. Like many of our growing list of customers, we know you won’t be disappointed!