Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions like Nutanix are improving their ability to support enterprise applications like SAP-HANA. The broader the application and workload that an HCI solution can support, the better the return on investment and the more it lives up to the HCI promise of a single architecture for the data center. The more workloads that HCI supports and the more mission-critical workloads it supports, the more critical it is for it to also provide enterprise class data protection.
The HCI Data Protection Challenge
Organizations embracing HCI should have a goal of consolidating as many workloads as possible into the environment. Traditional data protection solutions make achieving that goal more difficult because they typically require stand-alone servers or proxies that are not part of the HCI solution. They also often require storage that is external from the HCI cluster. While the customer may want the option to use external storage, they should also have the option to use available capacity within the HCI environment and leverage cross-cluster replication. Potentially most important is the data protection application has to support the enterprise-class applications in the HCI environment. For example, the HCI’s ability to support SAP-HANA is nearly useless if the data protection application can’t also protect it.
To learn more about the hyperconverged backup challenges read our article “Why Backup is Breaking Hyper-Converged Infrastructures and How to Fix it.”
HYCU 3.5 – Enterprise Protection for Enterprise HCI
As Storage Switzerland covered in its briefing note “The Value of High Focused Data Protection – HYCU Backup for Nutanix”, HYCU is a data protection application that is integrated into the Nutanix platform and provides seamless protection of it. HYCU customers can implement the solution in minutes and become proficient within an hour. Version 3.5 provides support for SAP-HANA and improves its support of MS-SQL. Unlike other solutions that require complex configurations to protect SAP- HANA, HYCU automatically detects and protects SAP-HANA without any unique configuration work done by the users or administrators. MS-SQL enhancements include the ability to protect Microsoft SQL Failover Clusters automatically. In both the SAP-HANA and MS-SQL use cases, no agents are required, and backups of the environments are impact-free.
Nutanix recently added volume groups which allow organizations to prioritize mission-critical workloads, segregating them away from less critical applications. HYCU 3.5 is the first data protection solution to add support for volume groups, providing impact-free, snapshot backup. The new release also enhances selective restore capabilities. Now, in addition to restoring full virtual machines, files, and folders, the software can restore individual disks. Lastly, version 3.5 also adds integrated reporting. HYCU customers don’t have to switch management platforms to obtain data protection status reports.
Introducing HYCU-X
Simultaneous with the version 3.5 release, HYCU also released HYCU-X which auto-deploys HYCU from within the Nutanix Calm Marketplace and auto-configures Nutanix Volumes and Files for backup, archive, and long-term data retention. HYCU-X eliminates the need for customers to deploy a separate backup architecture, instead of allowing it to coexist within the Nutanix framework.
StorageSwiss Take
Once an organization commits to HCI, the goal is to move as many workloads as possible to the infrastructure. As HCI vendors focus more on supporting enterprise applications they need to make sure that data protection isn’t missing from the conversation. HYCU not only enables organizations to protect enterprise applications they are migrating to the HCI environment it also enables them to eliminate stand-alone data protection silos.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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