Building Resilience with Multicloud Snapshot Technology
By Lalitha Ramesh, Principal Product Manager, Nutanix
As global organizations architect their business continuity strategies, a singular theme consistently stands out – resilience against unplanned downtime. Whether a disruption stems from a regional catastrophe or a sophisticated cyber-attack, unplanned downtime remains one of the most complex risks that enterprises must mitigate. Regardless of industry or geography, downtime disrupts people and operations at scale, erodes customer trust, creates risks of regulatory penalties, and directly impacts revenue streams.
To combat this, organizations are doubling down on achieving continuous, predictable resilience across hybrid, multi-cloud environments. Today, IT leaders face a critical balancing act – organizations eager to adopt AI to solve their business challenges and modernize their architectures, but without compromising on foundational security, reliability and governance objectives.
One example is healthcare – patient records should be accessible from the ambulance all the way to the hospital, even during regional disasters. Similarly, in Finance, an organization’s services must comply with regulatory mandates such as DORA, which necessitates robust geo-separation to keep banking apps online. For governments, agencies must balance high resiliency with compliance and data sovereignty regulations requiring sensitive data to remain both protected and local.
Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST)
Nutanix MST is purpose-built to help address these needs, providing Nutanix native cross-cloud data retention and data protection with flexible recovery options. MST leverages snapshots – point in time copies of application data – and replicates snapshots from Nutanix environments, running on-prem, in the cloud, edge, or in dark sites, to S3-compatible object stores.
During a Disaster Recovery (DR) scenario, MST enables recovering data with dynamic provisioning of compute resources to wherever the Nutanix platform is running. By integrating these capabilities, MST is designed to provide a unified and consistent way to protect and restore data, across hybrid, multi-cloud environments, freeing customers from the operational burden of stitching together siloed tools.
Figure: Nutanix MST replicates snapshots from hybrid multi-cloud environments to S3-compatible object stores and helps rehydrate and recover them to target clusters.
MST use cases
Organizations are increasingly leveraging MST to anchor their resilience strategies, across three critical use cases -
- Cost-Effective DR: For organizations that require robust DR with flexible recovery options, MST provides hybrid multi-cloud targets, helping reduce the need for expensive hardware overhead for DR purposes
- Primary Storage Optimization: By offloading snapshots to MST, organizations are leveraging MST as an extension of primary storage to optimize primary storage efficiency. In this scenario, MST functions as a “near-store” and provides the best of both worlds - supporting additional snapshots per VM and faster restores to Nutanix AOS primary storage compared to traditional cold storage. This helps in freeing up premium All-Flash clusters so that high-performance resources are dedicated to critical application workloads.
- Data Retention: MST serves as a vital engine for secondary and tertiary data retention, providing reliable, secure long-term snapshot retention.
Why does MST matter for Nutanix Customers?
MST isn’t just another snapshot management solution - it’s designed with flexibility, simplicity, scale, and security at its core. Here’s why MST matters:
Broad object store compatibility
MST integrates seamlessly with a wide range of S3-compatible object stores, providing flexibility to utilize the storage platform of your choice, without vendor lock-in. Supported object stores include Nutanix Objects Storage, AWS S3, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage, OVHcloud Object Storage, Wasabi and BackBlaze.
Instant restore
With NCI 7.5.1, MST Instant Restore (IR) is now GA, enabling instant recovery of workloads by prioritizing VM availability at scale. The VMs power on as soon as snapshot metadata is seeded on the cluster, while full data hydration continues in the background. This metadata‑first design is what makes MST IR special: it breaks the traditional dependency on waiting hours for full restores from S3 Objects, so you get the cloud economics of object storage with near‑instant VM access. Whether you’re running Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) workloads, web tiers, or AI training jobs, the value is clear - high‑speed restores and reduced application recovery times. View this demo to see how Nutanix MST Instant Restore can speed up application recovery times.
Clean room recovery
As ransomware attacks evolve, effective recovery needs a recovery environment that attackers cannot reach or tamper with at any stage of a compromise. Nutanix Clean Room recovery solution delivers this by providing a strictly isolated recovery environment with least-privileged access, where compromised workloads can be safely inspected, remediated and restored. MST serves as the backbone, replicating snapshots of Nutanix workloads to S3-compatible object storage. In the event of a breach, Nutanix Clean Room can be spun up on-premises or on Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) in the cloud on demand; VMs power on in the clean room within minutes via MST, allowing for rigorous validation before a safe failback to production. This disciplined approach to orchestrated recovery across compute, storage and network layers is designed to reduce app recovery times and help restore a “minimum viable business” in a clean slate.
Enterprise scale
As enterprises grow and data volumes surge, being able to manage large, complex environments without performance or recovery‑time trade‑offs is table stakes. MST is built for scale, supporting 1 hr RPO, up to 1 PB of live data, up to 5,000 VMs enabling enterprises to protect and recover massive workloads efficiently. A powerful example of this occurred during recent regional disruptions in the Middle East. A strategic customer leveraged MST to transition a significant volume of primary workloads to a stable region. By providing a cross-region recovery path, MST enabled the customer to bypass local instability issues and restore critical applications outside the impacted region.
Simplified management
Organizations want robust functionalities delivered through simple, intuitive interfaces. MST delivers exactly that with Prism Central, providing a single pane of glass, leveraging existing DR workflows such as protection policies and orchestrated recovery plans. The outcome? Operational simplicity and unified management - all in one place.
Transparent licensing
Organizations need clarity and control over their IT spend. MST is included as part of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pro and Ultimate licensing at no additional cost, simplifying budgeting and helping make long‑term financial planning predictable.
When to choose MST
MST is particularly well suited for:
- Hybrid and multi‑cloud environments that demand consistent data protection wherever workloads run
- Long-term snapshot retention
- Scenarios requiring secondary or 3rd data copies
- Applications that can accept moderate RTOs (from minutes up to a few hours)
- Workloads that benefit from a near‑store tier to enable faster restores back into Nutanix clusters
Flexible MST Deployment Patterns: Balancing Cost and Recovery Time
Organizations need multiple deployment options tailored to their priorities, whether that’s cost savings, fast recovery or an additional layer of resilience. MST delivers exactly that with Pilot Light, Zero Compute, and Multi-Site deployment patterns, providing a consistent foundation for data protection and recovery.
Pilot Light: In this pattern, a small “ready to ignite” Nutanix cluster is running in the target location, with just enough compute to manage critical workloads. During failover, the target cluster scales out to handle full production load. This enables faster recovery for critical workloads without incurring the full cost of a secondary site.
Zero Compute: With this pattern, there is no DR cluster running in the target environment. Instead, the target Nutanix Cloud Cluster (NC2) cluster is spun up on demand during a failover. This can deliver the lowest infrastructure costs among all Nutanix DR solutions, making it attractive for workloads that can accept longer recovery times but still require reliable protection. In the face of ongoing supply‑chain constraints, many customers prefer this approach because they no longer have to operate a permanent DR site. They can fail over from on‑premises to an on‑demand NC2 cluster, or pre-provision the target cluster, hibernate it and incur costs only when it resumes during failover.
Multi Site: Enterprises typically step up to a multisite deployment when they want data protection to span multiple geographies, need always‑on uptime, or must satisfy regulatory mandates for secondary or tertiary data retention. In a multi-site deployment, customers often combine Nutanix DR options such as:
Metro/ Sync DR with zero RPO between Site A and Site B for high availability
Asynchronous replication from Site A to Site C for regional protection
MST to S3-compatible object stores for added resilience and long-term retention
These deployment patterns operate as points along the cost versus RTO spectrum, giving customers the operational flexibility to tune each workload to the right balance of cost and recovery time that best fits their business objectives.
Figure: Spectrum of three deployment patterns - Zero Compute, Pilot Light, Full Site/Multi Site along a cost vs RTO spectrum, with Zero Compute offering lower cost, and Full Site/Multi Site offering lower RTO.
One example of this flexibility can be seen with Golding Contractors, one of Australia’s leading mining, civil infrastructure providers. As Golding’s business grew by over 400%, they needed a cost effective, robust DR solution. By standardizing on NC2, Golding created a unified operating model and leveraged their existing AWS cost optimizations. The real gamechanger? Golding adopted Zero Compute MST, eliminating the need for standby compute nodes. This approach dramatically reduced Golding’s DR costs while also enabling Golding to meet and exceed its RPO and RTO targets.
The Bottom Line
Strengthening resilience today is the key to safely securing the modernization of hybrid and multi-cloud environments for the future. Organizations must actively design for resilience across every single layer of their IT stack: infrastructure, platforms, and applications. Whether the priority is cost optimization or faster recoveries, MST meets customers where they are and supports adaptable resiliency with a reliable safety net to innovate with confidence.
For more information on MST, please visit these supporting blogs:
Building a Ransomware Clean Room
To use a guided click-through demo, please click the links below:
Click here for MST in AWS Cloud with AWS S3.
Click here for MST in Azure Cloud with Azure Blob.
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