HYCU designed for Nutanix

HYCU, the new entity dedicated for the data protection of the Nutanix environment and also Monitoring of F5 and Citrix environments, was a real good surprise during the recent IT Press Tour.

HYCU is a recent name introduced to the market a few months ago to reflect the mission around hyper convergde environments. The acronym means HYper Converged Unique to promote a different approach to the data protection challenges introduced by HCI platforms. HYCU comes from Comtrade Software with more 20 years of experience in the backup space having developed a few famous solutions like HP Omniback a long time ago. The company has more than 300 engineers dedicated to that market, supports 8 backup partners and other partners such Citrix, HP, F5 Networks, Nutanix, Microsoft and Google.

New platforms like HCI introduces new data protection challenges and like virtualized environment many years ago, it requires a radical new approach to satisfy the protection goal especially in a scale-out architecture.

HYCU develops a purpose-built data protection solution for Nutanix. It represents a unique approach radically different from competition such Rubrik and Cohesity even if all of them belong to the new generation family of data protection.

The company strategy is not to mimic classic approaches and products neither to replace functions but complement them, it satisfies and strengthens the Nutanix partnership. For example, HYCU discovers applications, understands RTO challenges and setup adequate policies to satisfy goals.

The philosophy is to be agent-less with a pure software model, this is key here to scale with the infra and avoid any intrusive approach with the deployment of the software. The product is very easy to deploy and setup, in just a few minutes you have a working environment ready to protect the production. The product could be seen as an intelligent data mover and orchestrator that stores backup images in various targets such backup NAS or object storage platform like Cloudian, AWS or Azure. This is really the solution of choice, if you deploy Nutanix you must consider HYCU.

The future is interesting as the team shared with us some directions perfectly aligned with Nutanix directions: Non Nutanix environments support, in fact already available since Q2 2018, SAP HANA and IBM Power CS Series for Q3 2018 and the support of LTFS as a new backup target. In fact all things that can appear as a file system, local or remote, could be considered as a good candidate. f course some tests are needed but this is true by principle. We understand also some technology synergies with Nutanix DR for ROBO and integration with CALM.

With all of that I anticipate a bit, but HYCU should land in one of their partners in the next 18 months. It was a superb session, the team traveled from east coast and Goran Garevski, the Engr chief, even came for Lubiana (Slovenia) to meet us in California. And finally an idea, as Nutanix is really a midrange solution, we invite HYCU team to consider Datrium and develops similar approach for them as Datrium really is an enterprise HCI play. A future session next year would be good to see progress...