As organizations migrate applications to the cloud, they sometimes assume that data protection is built-in to the service. However, what cloud service providers offer is high availability and durability, not backup. But organizations, whether their applications are in the cloud or not, need both. Last year HYCU introduced a backup as a service (BaaS) solution that tightly integrates with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It provides standalone point-in-time copies of data that organizations need to recover from application programming mistakes, malicious users, or ransomware attacks.
Finding a stand-alone solution to protect cloud-native applications is a frustrating quest for IT professionals. Beyond convincing the organization that the cloud is not a magical place where data never is corrupted, they also need to find a suitable backup application. The problem is applications that do provide cloud-native data protection support are often not tightly integrated into the service and force users to use an interface that is unfamiliar to them. These solutions also often recreate capabilities, like snapshots, that the cloud provider includes with their storage infrastructure, which increases costs and complexity.
HYCU for GCP is purpose-built for the platform. Not only does it “look and feel” like a GCP application, but it also leverages services that GCP supplies natively. To learn more about HYCU for GCP read our initial briefing note.
HYCU for GCP Fall 2019 Enhancements
The latest iteration of HYCU for GCP focuses on lowering the cost of cloud storage consumption, adding support for databases beyond Google’s SQL, improvements in reports, and increased savings for long-term use.
Lowering the cost of cloud storage typically means using technologies like deduplication. The problem with using deduplication in the cloud is that the process requires a significant amount of computing power and memory to make its calculations. The cost of provisioning that computing power and memory versus the potential capacity savings doesn’t always end up saving the customer money. HYCU, instead of using deduplication, is a compute free, always-on incremental backup technique, which not only lowers storage capacity costs, it lowers network bandwidth requirements.
HYCU also adds a Smart Archive function to enable customers to maintain point in time copies of specific data sets within the backup itself, thus reducing the need to make another copy, which also requires more data movement. HYCU can also use Google Storage’s auto-tiering capability to move data to lower-cost tiers of storage as it ages.
In this update, HYCU expands its application-aware data protection support from Google SQL to SAP HANA and to open source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL. HYCU’s SAP HANA support is the first Google native backup solution for SAP HANA workloads. For all three applications, HYCU supports GCP snapshots for database consistent, impact-free backup and recovery, without the use of agents.
HYCU for GCP is listed as a service on the Google Marketplace. It is priced on source capacity and sold through Google, Google Partners, and HYCU. In the latest release, HYCU is including discounts for annual commitments.
StorageSwiss Take
HYCU’s continued focus on purpose-built data protection is a critical factor in its success in the very competitive data protection market. HYCU for GCP, like its HYCU for Nutanix Acropolis and VMware counterparts, is explicitly designed for GCP and fully leverages its capabilities to create a reliable but cost-effective backup solution.
To learn more about HYCU, register for our 15 Minute Webinar:
To learn more about the purpose-built backup concept, watch our on demand webinar, “Do You Really Need to Consolidate Backup?” All attendees receive a copy of our latest white paper, “What is Purpose-Built Backup”.
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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