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Nutanix, HYCU and Integrated Data Protection in the New Normal

September 25, 2020 | min

As we all come to grips with what is the new normal, one thing that we can all agree on is we’ve all had to embrace change. In the world of IT, it can be one of the scariest words and in some situations painful. But, when change is embraced properly, it can also be the most rewarding. 

Take the evolution of IT over the past few years. The need to simplify IT, break down silos, and consolidate from a complex three-tier architecture are among the many reasons that more than 16,500 customers have chosen to run their businesses on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform. And while this change may have seemed daunting, our customers worldwide are happy with their choice--thanks to a unified, modular scale-out platform, one-click upgrades, great total cost of ownership, and more. 

Nutanix has continued innovating aggressively around data services--including both structured and unstructured data services, such as next-gen file services with Nutanix Files, integrated data protection with Nutanix Mine, and simple unstructured data management with Nutanix Objects. It may be time to evaluate if your backup infrastructure is designed to help you take full advantage of these and forthcoming innovations in the pipe. 

In terms of backup infrastructure technologies, you have four choices:

  • Legacy three-tier backup software – Designed to support each tier, but can be complex, time-consuming to deploy, maintain, and upgrade
  • Expensive backup appliances – Dedicated solutions, billed as all-in-one, but are relatively new, can be many times more expensive than your production environment investment and force you to rip and replace your existing infrastructure 
  • Generic cloud-based backup service – A new set of generic VM backup services that have a cloud UI, but are essentially a regular on-prem solution
  • Purpose-built service for the platform – A newer and rare breed of data protection solutions that are built from the ground up to leverage both on-prem and cloud native platforms for efficient data-protection

And, while there are pros and cons to each of the solutions, the decision must address whether the backup infrastructure technology can support your Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform investment, now and in the future. 

If you are running Nutanix in your datacenter, or considering it, chances are you have already heard about HYCU. HYCU was launched over three years ago and is a solution that was purpose-built for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud customers. HYCU offers impact-free, agentless, application-consistent, and cost-efficient backup and recovery. It is used by Nutanix customers in over 70+ countries for a host of reasons:

Purpose-built for Nutanix

Purpose-built refers to a solution built from scratch to efficiently protect the Nutanix platform with zero performance impact. Case in point, HYCU is the first-and-only enterprise backup and recovery software solution to provide VM-stun free backups of ESXi on Nutanix. HYCU was also first to support AHV, Nutanix Files, Volume groups, Nutanix ROBO, and much more. This is all possible only because of HYCU’s long-term commitment in aligning its roadmap with Nutanix, and being purpose-built for Nutanix users. 

100% Application Focus

Unlike other solutions, HYCU can automatically discover all applications (such as MS SQL, Exchange, Oracle, SAP HANA, etc.) with our patented application awareness technology. HYCU also offers agentless backups of not just VMs but applications with granular point-in-time recovery. With the combination of HYCU’s application-protection and integration with Nutanix snapshots, users will not experience performance impacts when their applications are being backed up.

Designed with 1-click Simplicity in Mind 

Just like Nutanix, HYCU is extremely easy to deploy, maintain, and upgrade. This is due to HYCU’s vApp-based agentless deployment and auto-application discovery, where the entire setup can be completed in minutes. With HYCU’s highly intuitive UI tailored around Nutanix PRISM’s UI and Nutanix terminology, 1-click backup migration and DR workflows, and integration into Nutanix Prism UI, administrators can get started in minutes.

Enhanced backup security and advanced Ransomware protection

HYCU can help secure backups so that you can safeguard your datacenter and quickly recover from any malicious attacks including ransomware. To learn how HYCU helped a customer against ransomware, please read this report. HYCU also supports end-to-end in-transit encryption, network segmentation for secure data-transfer, legal hold, Nutanix Objects-based WORM support, and even allows for detailed user-level access control for restricting access to users from unauthorized resources.

Promote self-service for operational efficiency 

HYCU can empower end-users by enabling DevOps-styled environments where application owners can protect, recover, and clone their VMs and applications. HYCU provides a detailed multi-tenant framework that helps administrators to host secure sandbox style environments in a shared infrastructure. HYCU’s RBAC can help delegate simple tasks to end users, which can free up time for administrators to focus on high-value tasks.

Increased ROI with reduced TCO

HYCU’s incredibly lightweight architecture helps you save up to 50% of your datacenter resources, such as compute, storage, and licensing costs. HYCU has a lightweight footprint, and can easily scale across multiple Nutanix clusters with ease. HYCU can help you further save more money by repurposing existing hardware or public cloud vendors (AWS S3, GCP and Azure) to store backups, as HYCU is a target-agnostic backup solution. HYCU also provides all application backups and inbuilt reporting infrastructure as a standard offering at no additional cost.

Integrated data protection for secondary storage and archive

If you’re looking to procure Nutanix secondary storage to protect your Nutanix primary workloads, look no further as HYCU is available with Nutanix Mine and Nutanix Objects to provide you a seamless data-protection experience. Nutanix Mine with HYCU can help set up secondary storage in minutes, and can also provide integrated UI with Nutanix PRISM for a more unified management experience.

Outstanding customer service and support

Just as Nutanix has pioneered what the standard for customer service and support should be with a six-year average Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 90, HYCU is also quickly becoming known for exceptional customer service. Our approach has always been to treat all of our customers with empathy and care. Our technical support representatives are known for their high technical acumen and professionalism. And, these are all contributors to why our own NPS score is 91, the highest currently of any backup and recovery vendor.

We know that change can seem daunting. However, if you apply the same rationale for why you are making or are interested in making the investment with Nutanix to your supporting applications and backup infrastructure, we know HYCU will not disappoint. Make sure to check us out at the Global .NEXT Digital Experience. HYCU is proud to be a Platinum Sponsor that is also bringing you the Nutanix .Next Show! As the CIO at a leading healthcare organization noted recently, “Any CIO in healthcare looking to transform the patient experience in this new normal, you have to look at HYCU, Nutanix and AHV. It’s just that simple.”

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