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Comtrade Software, which has hitched its fortunes to that of hyperconverged systems powerhouse Nutanix, is now reaching out to offer new support for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server.
Earlier this year, Comtrade launched its HYCU platform, which is purpose-built data storage protection for Nutanix servers. On Nov. 27, the Boston-based company said its new support for vSphere, Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS, Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server is combined with disaster recovery and backup for Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) environments.
Also included are blueprints for including Nutanix Calm Marketplace and beta for Acropolis File Services (AFS), Comtrade said.
“The continued innovation that HYCU brings to Nutanix customers is impressive, particularly, in remote office (ROBO) environments and in environments that use Acropolis File Services (AFS),” said Raja Mukhopadhyay, Vice President of Product Management at Nutanix. “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.”
HYCU is All About Automation
HYCU–designed as a 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 in June, the company said.
“We know there is an appetite for customers looking for purpose-built, hypervisor agnostic data protection that is tightly aligned with their Nutanix investment,” Comtrade President Simon Taylor told eWEEK. “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 leading-edge application and hypervisor support.
“Now with vSphere, users 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.”
Key benefits of the new enhancements to HYCU include:
- Intelligent data protection for Nutanix AHV and VMware vSphere: Because HYCU is hypervisor-agnostic, users gain the same interface and look and feel, whether they are using AHV or vSphere. HYCU also provides application- and VM-level backup but uses the Nutanix storage-level snapshots, avoiding issues with I/O latency. HYCU 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 percent of recovery requests happen within the first 72 hours.
- Efficient 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 percent on the network bandwidth cost. Users who need DR can set up standard Nutanix Protection Domains for the VMs and Apps. For efficient 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 from Nutanix Marketplace: HYCU is now available as a ready-to-deploy blueprint for Nutanix customers right on the Calm Marketplace. Customers looking for data protection can now simply 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: Nutanix Acropolis Filesystem (AFS) users gain the first purpose-built data protection support for impact-free, agentless fileshare backup. HYCU uses Nutanix Change File Tracking (CFT) APIs to perform impact free backup. It also uses 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 users have in their systems. Traditionally, file-system backups were dreaded because of the hours or days it took to complete them. HYCU speeds up by nearly 20-fold, Comtrade said.
- Deeper application coverage: For Microsoft Exchange, IT administrators gain discovery and consistent backup of single server MS Exchange environments as well as mailbox level recovery. For Microsoft SQL Server, 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.
Pricing and Availability
HYCU is currently available for purchase worldwide through Comtrade partners. List pricing starts at $1,500/socket or $999/socket for Nutanix Xpress Edition. Go here for more information.