New Capabilities in AHV Hypervisor and Hyperconverged Infrastructure Platform Simplify Disaster Recovery to Protect Business Critical Applications

Nutanix has announced several new capabilities in its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software and AHV hypervisor to protect business-critical applications and maintain continuous business operations in the face of a possible disaster.

New capabilities include advanced automation for recovering applications and data, support for seamless multi-site disaster recovery (DR), synchronous replication for workloads running on AHV hypervisor, and a near-zero data loss with “near sync” replication for recovery point objective (RPO) times of approximately 20 seconds.

At a time when business continuity is more important than ever, ensuring businesses have strong recovery policies and procedures is no longer a “nice to have.” However, customers looking to implement strong DR plans for critical applications, such as those supporting emergency services, had little choice but to deploy complex, often disparate technologies that demand specialized, on-going administration. The new capabilities in Nutanix HCI and AHV hypervisor help enable customers to confidently deliver mission-critical applications with significantly less complexity and lower management overhead.

“Maintaining continuous business operations is a high priority for all types of companies and organizations”.“However, most businesses rely on custom, handcrafted DR implementations to guard against system-wide IT failures. Nutanix now natively delivers automated, easy-to-deploy disaster recovery solutions built to deliver applications that must always be available.”

said Greg Smith, VP of Product Marketing at Nutanix

New capabilities to simplify and automate DR efforts include:

• Multi-Site Disaster Recovery: Nutanix now supports multi-site DR designs, helping enable enterprises to quickly recover from the simultaneous failure of two or more data centers while keeping applications and data available to users. Particularly valuable in regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, and emergency services where organizations need to deliver uninterrupted service, Nutanix DR leverages advanced automation technology to eliminate the complexity of DR installation and ongoing orchestration. Application teams can quickly recover from unplanned outages or data corruption and set configurations to adhere to many stringent compliance requirements.
• Unmatched Near Sync Disaster Recovery: Nutanix now supports near sync replication with an RPO of only about 20 seconds, a 3x improvement from its already industry-leading technology. Nutanix is the only leading HCI vendor to offer a 20-second RPO.
• Synchronous Data Replication for Nutanix AHV: Synchronous replication, or the nearly instantaneous replication of data between multiple locations, is now natively supported on the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. AHV can be used by customers to deliver a highly available service for their most important workloads, such as virtual desktop infrastructure, databases, and general server virtualization.
• DR Orchestration with Runbooks: The latest release gives customers more flexibility and control over the end-to-end recovery process, with more granular control to focus DR resources toward targeted applications.

“Our business users expect a zero recovery point objective, which guarantees no data loss when a failover occurs following a datacenter outage”.“We are delighted to now use Nutanix’s AHV virtualization and to maintain the highest possible SLA for our production workloads.”

said Delfim Da Costa, System and Infrastructure Manager at Infomil, an IT spin-off of a large European retailer and a Nutanix customer since 2015

Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) combines common datacenter hardware using locally attached storage resources with intelligent software to create flexible building blocks that replace legacy infrastructure consisting of separate servers, storage networks, and storage arrays. Benefits include lower TCO, increased performance, and greater productivity within IT teams. Enterprise IT teams today are looking for ways to deliver on-premises IT services with the speed and operational efficiency of public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. A comprehensive enterprise cloud platform bridges the gap between traditional infrastructure and public cloud services—and hyperconvergence is at the core of an enterprise or hybrid cloud. The simplicity and flexibility of hyperconverged infrastructure is also driving many companies to repatriate their workloads from the public cloud back on-premises.

These new DR capabilities are included in the Nutanix HCI software and are generally available. More information on Nutanix business continuity and disaster recovery solutions are available here.