Comtrade Software HYCU: Data Protection for Nutanix Providing Deeper Application and Hypervisor Support

Comtrade Software, Inc. announced support for vSphere as well as deeper application support for Exchange and SQL, combined DR and backup for ROBO environments, along with blueprints for Nutanix, Inc.‘ Calm Marketplace and beta for Acropolis File Services (AFS).

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The deeper integration with the Nutanix enterprise cloud OS provides customers with the simplicity, ease of use and management, and enhanced data protection capabilities they need for their IT environments.

“The power of the Nutanix platform continues to drive innovation for our global customers,” said Raja Mukhopadhyay, VP, product management, Nutanix. “The continued innovation that HYCU brings to Nutanix customers is impressive, particularly, in ROBO environments and in environments that leverage Acropolis File Services. With HYCU, our customers gain the flexibility and choice they need in order to best converge their protection and recovery onto the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform.“

“We are extremely pleased with the market’s reception to HYCU since its introduction in June. We know there is an appetite for customers looking for purpose-built, hypervisor agnostic data protection that is tightly aligned with their Nutanix investment,” said Simon Taylor, president, Comtrade. “By introducing choice and flexibility for customers looking to reap the advantages that Nutanix has to offer, it is critical to continue to advance HYCU and innovate with application and hypervisor support. Now with vSphere, customers can rest assured that the same simplicity and ease-of-use we introduced with HYCU and AHV will carry forward for them with their hypervisor of choice.“

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HYCU, designed to be simple to use, one-click backup, two-minute recovery, three minutes to deploy and four to learn, has been deployed by more than 200 customers and partners since its introduction.

Data protection integration for all workloads on the Nutanix platform, IT administrators gain a app-centric solution to support their hypervisor of choice along with Nutanix file-services and ROBO use cases.

Key benefits of the enhancements to HYCU include:

• Intelligent Data Protection for Nutanix AHV and vSphere: As HYCU is hypervisor agnostic, customers gain the same interface and look and feel whether they are using AHV or vSphere. HYCU also provides application and VM level backup, but leverages the Nutanix storage level snapshots, avoiding issues with I/O latency like VM stun where the VM becomes unresponsive (stunned) because of the underlying data protection process. It alleviates this by providing little to no impact on production. By using the storage level snapshot, HYCU has fewer limitations than legacy backup and recovery providers. According to the majority of HYCU customers, 95% of recovery requests happen within the first 72 hours. Based on these customers’ experiences, it provides a fast level of recovery with the least amount of complexity compared to any other data protection provider they have used to date.

• Backup combined with DR for ROBO environments: With Nutanix and HYCU, customers get combined DR and backup, without requiring incremental human resources and by saving nearly 50% on the network bandwidth cost. Customers who need DR can set up standard Nutanix protection domains for the VMs and Apps. For data protection, HYCU uses the DR copy to create to the original source when needed. As a result, customers get a backup without having the data from the source to the DR site and also gain granular recovery capabilities.

• One-click HYCU deployment right from Nutanix Marketplace: HYCU is available as a ready to deploy blueprint for Nutanix customers right on the Calm Marketplace. Customers looking for data protection can click to add HYCU to their environments. Calm helps orchestrate the provisioning, scaling, and management of applications for a true app-centric experience.

• Early trials for AFS backup and recovery: AFS users gain the first purpose-built data protection support for impact-free, agentless file share backup. HYCU leverages Nutanix Change File Tracking (CFT) APIs to perform impact free backup. It also leverages the scale out function of AFS to perform backups in parallel. Even the first full backup can be completely parallelized by the number of nodes the customers have in their systems.
  Traditionally, filesystem backups were dreaded because of the hours or days it took to backup filesystems and with HYCU it will speed up by nearly twenty-fold. HYCU also saves an amount of computing resources for the customer because the traditional crawling the file system to determine changed files is completely eliminated with HYCU.

• Deeper application coverage: For Exchange, IT administrators gain discovery and consistent backup of single server MS Exchange environments as well as mailbox level recovery. For SQL, customers gain the ability to restore individual databases to a different MS SQL Server as well as the ability to clone full database instances for test and development purposes.

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“Many IT administrators are looking for their data protection solutions to play a critical role not just for traditional platform owners–namely database and virtual server admins-but for the emerging new cloud admin role to keep their respective workloads up and running,” said George Crump, lead analyst, Storage Switzerland LLC. “While the data protection market continues to mature, solutions like HYCU that are purpose-built for Nutanix platform users are well-suited to drive value as the role of the traditional backup administrator evolves and the cloud and virtual admin continues to gain prominence. For organizations looking at data protection solutions for Nutanix, they should seriously consider HYCU.“

HYCU is currently available for purchase worldwide through the company’s partners. List pricing starts at $1,500/socket or $999/socket for Nutanix Xpress edition.