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The Newest Chapter in the HYCU for the Nutanix-led Data Center Journey

The Newest Chapter in the HYCU for the Nutanix-led Data Center Journey

Written by
Don Jennings
Published on
May 8, 2019
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This week at #NEXTConf, before more than 7,000 Nutanix partners and customers,

We are excited to unveil the latest release of HYCU for Nutanix (version 4.0)

The first and only purpose-built backup and recovery solution for Nutanix.

We are doubly excited for this release because it aligns with the launch of Nutanix Mine with HYCU, which makes backup invisible for customers.

The primary objectives for v4.0 are:

  1. Continue our journey with Nutanix partners and customers to make sure we deliver complete coverage for the Nutanix-led Datacenter
  2. Extend our focus on intelligent automation to continue to reduce time customers have to spend
  3. Rapid coverage for Nutanix innovation to accelerate adoption

Customers and industry watchers are always amazed at the amount of innovation our engineering team has been able to deliver in less than two years since we launched HYCU for Nutanix at .Next ‘17 Washington DC.  We have been able to do this not only because of our team’s experience in building enterprise-class data protection solutions for more than 25 years. This is a huge credit to our engineers, and hats off to our engineering leadership, Goran Garevski, our VP, Engineering and each and every engineer that helps make HYCU what it is today.

There are a number of significant developments with our latest release. Here are a few highlights:

  1. Expanding Coverage for Nutanix-led Datacenter
  2.  Delivering scalable and efficient backup of NFS Share on Nutanix Files: HYCU was the first solution to have an efficient backup of Nutanix Files with SMB using Nutanix Change File Tracking APIs. We are proud that we had the privilege of working closely with Nutanix when they developed the APIs. Now that the Nutanix Files team has introduced Change File Tracking APIs for Nutanix NFS, HYCU is right there to make sure we have added support for efficient, scalable backup of NFS Shares. With NFS, the shares get even larger and customers sometimes want to have different backup policies for different parts of their shares. And, with our latest enhancements, HYCU allows them to do exactly that.  
  3. Making physical support meaningful with application aware backups: Customers by default want all of their applications virtualized. The only area where we see physical servers in customer environment is for specialized infrastructure, like an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system or extremely specialized database workloads that have to run on specialized Windows systems. To support customers like that, HYCU has added support for applications and data running on Windows Physical Servers. This native built in functionality in HYCU delivers the same HYCU simplicity - from auto discovering the applications, to providing an App Consistent backup to granular file level and application level recovery.
  4. Extending Intelligent automation
  5.  Enhancing the customer experience via call-home functionality: With our latest enhancements, HYCU has a built-in option to turn on call-home functionality. The benefits for customers are that it allows us to proactively notify them of any major issue, if it were to occur in the release they are using and prevent any mishap. And, it makes their customer service interaction even smoother because our customer support team will be able to look up a customer’s configuration and start with a great base of information to assist.  
  6. Consolidated view across multi-site deployment: The good thing about HYCU is that it is extremely simple to deploy and a single deployment of HYCU can manage multiple Nutanix and VMWare clusters. That said, customers do have multiple sites and multiple instances within their own datacenter for a variety of business reasons. For example, one of our large customers, focused on logistics, and that has more than 50 sites and one of our service provider customers that has more than 90 sites is using the consolidated view. These customers, along with all others, have a single consolidated console to manage all of their HYCU instances distributed across their enterprise.

 

  1. Application Data Restore Optimization:
    As most of you know by now, HYCU is the only solution that uses Nutanix Snapshots not just for backup, but also for recovery. So, our application data recoveries are much faster and do not impact any customers’ full production run right after recovery. That said, our engineers are always looking for ways to accelerate recovery, because that is the only reason anyone backs up data for :-) We have done optimizations in multiple area:  
  2.   When we have to recover application data, we can selectively restore just the disks that are needed to get the right set of application data and not have to recover the full Virtual Machines.  
  3. When customers want to try multiple recover points to find what they need, we have done optimizations to reduce the amount that have to be transferred from the backup target onto the recovery area
  1. Accelerating Adoption of Nutanix Innovation
  2.  Support for Nutanix Near Sync: Nutanix introduced Near Sync functionality almost a year ago, but one of the challenges with Near Sync volumes was that customers couldn’t use snapshots to back it up. So, at that time customers were forced to use agent-based tech or VMware level snapshots to backup data. Nutanix introduced the ability to take snapshots of a Near Sync volume almost five months ago and HYCU was the first one to support it for VMs running in AHV. With this release we are able to support VMs using Near Sync and running on both AHV & ESX. So, customers can get the higher availability and not lose on the simplicity and efficiency of backup.  
  3. Support for Nutanix Files with NFS and Nutanix Buckets: As I had mentioned earlier, we added support for Nutanix Files with NFS in this release. But in addition, we have continued to validate our support for Nutanix Buckets which we demonstrated back in .Next Nice as part of Nutanix’s session.

Our latest version of HYCU for Nutanix will be generally available in the next 30 days. We have many, many more capabilities in our latest release and you will be able to find them in detail in our Release Notes when we post it on our download/support site. If you are at Nutanix .Next in Anaheim, please stop by and we would love to talk to you about some of the capabilities that will be part of the new release and an integral part of our latest innovation with Nutanix, Nutanix Mine with HYCU. We can even demo our latest for you if you come by your booth in the Platinum Village (P04). We appreciate your feedback and on-going support, and look forward to continuing to gain your vote of confidence and loyalty in how we address the emerging challenges with multi-cloud backup and recovery.

Shive Raja Headshot

Senior Director of Global Communications and PR

Don Jennings, Senior Director of Global Communications and PR at HYCU, Inc., is a seasoned communications executive with a career rooted in the enterprise IT space. Formerly a tech lead at an award-winning PR agency, Don excels at driving results and building strong relationships without resorting to games or annoying stakeholders. Passionate about storage, cloud, and data protection, and maintains robust connections with storage, IT, and enterprise software media and influencers.

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