Expanding the use of Nutanix AOS for backup

When customers started deploying HYCU, one of the first pieces of feedback we received was that customers loved the fact that we can run HYCU right on their Nutanix system and they did not need a separate infrastructure or another silo to manage. As expected, to backup your VMs and apps, customers need a storage target. The most common question we received was, “I love my Nutanix. Can I simplify my backup infrastructure management by using Nutanix Storage Dense nodes as backup targets?” Our answer was absolutely! Some of our customers use the NFS protocol to set it up this way. In this release, we added tight integration with Nutanix systems so that the backup data can be transferred through the Nutanix scale-out storage protocol (ABS) and the backup traffic can be load balanced from the Nutanix production system to the target nodes – significantly shrinking the backup window. The additional good news here is that customers using Nutanix OEMs like Lenovo HX and Dell XC can also do the same.

When ComTrade say backup to a Nutanix target, people freak out and say shouldn’t the backup be on a different location than your original cluster. Comtrade have to remind folks that as long-time backup practitioners we will not recommend a crazy thing like that ???? Comtrade recommend each and every customer set up a separate Storage Dense cluster or if they have multiple clusters, they add capacity to existing clusters and do cross cluster backup. This way, your 3-2-1 backup best practice is maintained.

 

Support for S3 Compatible Storage for Service Providers

As Comtrade started talking with Service Providers and larger customers, one of the top requests we got was for supporting S3 compatible Storage infrastructure. While they offered support for AWS to start, we worked with Cloudian and Scality to test and validate their solutions. They have now broadened their support for S3 compatible storage to include both Cloudian and Scality.

Extended Application Support

HYCU does automated application discovery and app consistent backup and recovery. Since most Nutanix customers also run Active Directory on their Nutanix Cluster, this is the top requested application for discovery from customers. So, they have now added automated discovery and consistent backup and recovery of Microsoft Active Directory.

Expanded Support for Federal, State and Local Governments

Federal, state and local government customers seem to love Nutanix. As they started looking at HYCU, they really liked what they saw. They asked Comtrade to do two things. Make sure they are FIPS compliant and that they have added encryption support. They did both. Even in our prior release customers were able to leverage the hardware-based encryption for data at rest, encrypt data to and from AWS and Azure and also encrypt data at rest on the cloud. But customers requested us to provide end-to-end software encryption for their NFS, SMB and iSCSI/ABS targets. So, they have added it. When customers choose this encryption, the data will be encrypted all the way from source to target and for data at rest.

Performance & Optimization

In general, it’s never a best practice to create large VMs, i.e. VMs in the multi-Terabyte range. However, as they all know, there are always situations where customers may need to create and backup and recover from large VMs for application/business specific reasons. The size of the VMs/apps does impact the backup. HYCU uses Nutanix v3 APIs and all of the backups are incremental. To complement our existing parallel backups, Comtrade have also paralleled the task of finding the differentials and have worked with Nutanix engineering to make sure they use the optimal block sizes for backup.

If you are interested in learning more about HYCU or if you are interested in learning more first-hand, then please try it for yourself by going to tryhycu.com. A full list of features we have added to the latest version of HYCU can be found here.