HYCU Transforms Nutanix Backup Efficiency and Simplicity

Business Challenge
Adventist Risk Management had recently rebuilt its data center environment from its legacy blade servers to a 100% Nutanix environment that consolidated computing, networking and storage infrastructure. They needed a backup and recovery strategy that took full advantage of Nutanix’s benefits. Unfortunately, the first solution they chose presented too many challenges to overcome.

According to Tony Vargas, Vice President and CIO for Adventist Risk Management, the company backs up 36 nodes (72 sockets) across two sites in the U.S. and one in the UK, replicating to a disaster recovery site in Idaho. To handle backup, they had six products managed via 16 portals. In addition to being overly complex, this arrangement made it difficult to replicate the environment in a timely fashion, potentially hindering their ability to meet compliance requirements for retaining financial data.

They settled on a backup and recovery solution that purported to work with Nutanix.

“We had major problems right from the beginning. It was so complex,” Vargas recalls. “The vendor’s own installation professionals had trouble. The product never worked as promised.” 

Plus, the amount of rack space the solution required and the resources they consumed were substantial. Of the 200 virtual servers in the new environment, the backup solution required 20.

Following several frustrating months, Vargas went searching for a better alternative. “We wanted something simple. We wanted to know everything was getting backed up.”

Solution

Vargas had heard good things about HYCU and decided to trial it with a full proof of concept in his company’s environment. The HYCU difference was apparent right away.

“It installed so quickly,” Vargas recalls. “Deployments with other products could take weeks or months. We had HYCU up and running in minutes.”

During the course of the trial, Vargas said his team had some questions and HYCU Support was readily available to assist.

“One thing that blew me away was that we had a direct path to the HYCU development team,” he says. “We made a suggestion for changing something and HYCU indicated it would be in the next version. It wasn’t just promised—it was delivered.”

Vargas notes that a key difference between HYCU and other backup products is that HYCU is purpose-built for Nutanix, rather than retrofitted, “So it works like it’s supposed to work.”

Benefits

Radical Simplicity

HYCU provides a single interface for managing backup and recovery across the entire environment. “Imagine going from 16 portals to manage our environment to one. It was incredible,” Vargas says. “Things that are so complicated to do in traditional backup products are very simple and intuitive in HYCU. We needed very little training. I can see instantly what’s getting backed up and, if there’s a problem, where the problem is.”

Resource Efficiency

“It’s shocking how little overhead HYCU requires,” Vargas says, noting that moving to HYCU nearly doubled their Nutanix capacity. HYCU requires just one virtual server versus the 20 servers required by their previous backup product. 

Full Nutanix Support

HYCU enables users to take advantage of powerful capabilities like Nutanix Files. “My team has been urging me to go down that path to simplify our file management. I have resisted because there wasn’t a clean way to back that up— until HYCU,” Vargas says. “To my knowledge, HYCU is the only solution capable of doing that in the way we need.”

About the customer

Adventist Risk Management®, Inc. is the official insurance and risk management company for the Seventh-day Adventist Church and Adventist ministries. The company provides insurance products and innovative risk management solutions for Adventist ministries worldwide.

You can download the case study here: 

To learn how HYCU can help your Nutanix, Azure or Google Cloud Platform backup strategy, visit www.hycu.com or email info@hycu.com.