The big news, early support for Nutanix Mine, comes later this year, but other new capabilities kick in right away.
Boston-based HYCU, which makes a data backup, recovery and monitoring solution that was custom-built for Nutanix, and which is sold exclusively through channel partners, announced HYCU for Nutanix v4.0 at the Nutanix .NEXT event in Anaheim last week. Its major new capability is support for the newly announced Nutanix Mine, the new Nutanix new backup-as-a-service offering that brings Nutanix into the hyper-converged infrastructure [HCI] secondary storage market. That is a futures item, however. While HYCU will be one of the two backup vendors to get Mines when it becomes available, that isn’t scheduled until some point in the second half of 2019. Still, the new release will have important new capabilities, including support for Windows Physical Servers, new call-home functionality, and a new consolidated view across multi-site deployments.
HYCU launched two years ago at the .NEXT event in Washington D.C., at which time they had a little booth and were part of another company. Since then they have spun out onto their own, and become a much larger presence at .NEXT the last two years, this year with a Platinum sponsorship. They have also done very well.
“Today, we are sold in over 50 countries and have over 900 customers,” said Subbiah Sundaram, VP Products at HYCU. “We have 290-plus partners worldwide, 170 of whom are in North America. Because we make our partnering so simple, the majority of partners who buy us sign up for the program, and because we are 100 per cent channel, there is no channel conflict.”
In the long term, Nutanix Mine, when it becomes available, will be the most important part of this release. Five backup vendors have been initially certified on it, with HYCU and Veeam being the two who will get it first.
“When we introduced HYCU-X, which was part of our 3.5 release, it combined with Nutanix storage for a dense node capability that was similar to Nutanix Mine, but Mine is more robust,” Sundaram said. “It makes backup a service within the Nutanix platform. For us, this is significant because a lot of partners still think of us as selling backup software, even though we are the only ones who support the entire breadth of the Nutanix portfolio. Us being part of Mine will get a lot more sellers to think of us, especially as we will be working with Nutanix as a single SKU.”
HYCU will have support for the expansion of the Nutanix Files Changed File Tracking [CFT] capability, which allows for much more efficient identification and backup of files which have been changed, reducing the window for incremental backups in larger environments
“We were the first one to efficiently back up Nutanix SMB [Server Message Block] file services, and we are continuing our support for Nutanix Files with support for CFT,” Sundaram said. In addition to providing more efficient backup of larger environments, HYCU 4.0 lets customers establish different backup policies for different parts of their file shares.
Another significant addition is support for applications and data running on Windows Physical Servers. This is designed to support niche enterprise use cases where the customer doesn’t want to virtualize a specific application. Examples would be where specialized infrastructure is involved, like an Interactive Voice Response system, or extremely specialized database workloads that need to run on specialized Windows systems.
“This was an issue with a lot of large enterprise customers, that certain apps required Windows physical servers, so with this release we have added Windows physical server support,” Sundaram said.
“This was the last enterprise check box that we had to go through,” said Don Jennings, HYCU’s Director of Communications.
HYCU 4.0 for Nutanix also introduced the ability to manage multiple Nutanix and VMware clusters through a single consolidated console, allowing customers to manage of their HYCU instances distributed across their enterprise. This consolidated console will also support Nutanix Mine when it becomes available.
“We have been selling to customers with 25 sites, 55 sites and up,” Sundaram said. “They wanted a single pane of glass across all infrastructure. Now they can manage a large number of deployments from one place.
“Another function that we are adding is a built-in option to turn on call-home functionality,” Sundaram added. “This enhances our customer support by making sure that we are proactive in telling the customer that there is a major issue before we address it.”
This software release expands support for Nutanix NearSync to VMs using NearSync and running on both AHV & ESX. It also provides validated support for Nutanix Buckets, which HYCU had first demonstrated in late 2017 at the .NEXT event in Nice France.
“Our focus is always to keep up with Nutanix innovation on a constant basis,” Sundaram concluded.
HYCU for Nutanix v4.0 is scheduled to be generally available within 30 days, with the Mine support coming later when it is available.
