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HYCU, which provides industry-respected data backup, recovery and monitoring for hyperconverged IT infrastructures, is taking its business one big, intentional step at a time.
The Boston-based company, branded Comtrade Software until it renamed itself after its No. 1 product two years ago, on March 31—World Data Backup Day—announced a major addition to its new-gen Protégé SaaS offering, this time to accommodate workloads on the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform.
With the addition of the new purpose-built support for Azure Cloud, the company said, Protégé now provides tightly integrated data protection, migration and disaster recovery for Azure users. The whole idea HYCU has is to offer more options for companies to select their cloud of choice for their data the way they would want to control it.
The addition of Azure follows the November 2019 addition for support for Google Cloud Platform. HYCU started out life in 2017 as a purpose-built backup and data retention package for Nutanix storage systems, grew fast along with the growth of Nutanix itself, and then added support for VMware before adding the GCP option. So, with Azure, the company has made four big additions over its HYCU history.
Elephant in the Room?
Eventually, that elephant in the room, Amazon Web Services, may become the next big step for HYCU, although mum’s the word at the company. If and when that does happen, eWEEK will be there to help spread the word.
“These additions all are really end-to-end [storage and data recovery] point solutions for these major clouds—both enterprise clouds and public clouds,” CEO Simon Taylor told eWEEK. “We wanted to make all that data more accessible and valuable for customers. So we’ve created something we call an inverted platform, where we took the components—like keys on a piano—the Nutanix key, the VMware key, the GCP key and Azure key, and placed them all under one consolidated management framework and created a single pane of glass, called HYCU Protégé.
“What we’ve really built is a multi-cloud data management platform.”
In celebration of World Backup Day, and to address the growing need for companies to handle the overwhelming impact of the rise in remote and at-home working in light of the COVID-19 Novel Coronavirus pandemic, HYCU is making its HYCU for Azure data protection functionality available free of charge for the next three months, Taylor said.
“With HYCU for Azure, customers will be able to migrate data from on-prem to the cloud, protect the data on Azure, make Azure a DR target for both applications and VMs running on-prem and also have a simplified DR solution for their applications on Azure,” Taylor said.
A Lot of Companies Running Azure
With 60% of businesses running applications on Azure, Azure has experienced strong growth in particular with early-stage cloud adopters. In a recent informal survey of HYCU customers, more than 70% were running applications on Azure, the company said.
Highlights of HYCU for Azure include:
- True as a Service Offering: As opposed to legacy backup solutions that require a separate infrastructure to run in the cloud, HYCU for Azure runs as a native service, available via subscription directly from Azure Marketplace and billed as part of the Azure bill.
- Extends and Leverages the Power of the Azure Platform: Using native snapshots and integration with Microsoft’s Active Directory, HYCU for Azure is built on native APIs, supports all BLOB storage classes and auto-selects the right class of Azure BLOB storage for the policy the customer chooses.
- VMs/Apps on Azure: Agentless, HYCU for Azure provides flexible backup policies to meet different SLAs as well as a one-click view of protected and unprotected apps/VMs. Easy to perform granular recovery, HYCU for Azure also leverages its own IP for Change Block Tracking to provide incremental backups forever for extremely efficient storage consumption.
- One-Click, App Consistent Migration from On-Premises on to Azure and Back: As both application aware and consistent, HYCU provides 1-click migration with no worries about network constraints. Delivered as a true self-service, even for migration and Test/Dev, HYCU for Azure requires zero compute resources on the cloud during migration.
- One-Click App Consistent DR for Customers Who Want to Use Azure as a DR Target: With simplified failover and failback, no limitations with network constraints and no additional compute required on the cloud, HYCU for Azure is an extremely efficient and cost-efficient DR service for users that need that capability.
Pricing and Availability
HYCU for Azure is available now, with data migration and disaster recovery functionality generally available in 30 days. HYCU for Azure is available on Azure Marketplace and through authorized Azure Provider partners. Subscription and billing are handled through Azure Marketplace. Pricing is determined by the amount of data being protected and frequency of backup.