Purpose Built Backup Solutions for Hyperconverged Infrastructures – Enter HYCU

For the past several years we have all seen a steady and increasing adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure solutions. It seems that there is convergence and hyperconvergence mentioned in every product announcement across the IT Infrastructure landscape. The idea of converging multiple applications with their hardware and software baggage into a compact, efficient platform has wide appeal, e.g. cell phones.

The cell phone isn’t just a phone anymore. The utility the phone brings to the user is effectively a multipurpose personal computer – phone, entertainment hub, HD camera, streaming video and music player and much more without any wires.  And it fits in your pocket. Imagine trying to carry all of the equipment it would take to deliver the services of your phone without the converged solution. It certainly wouldn’t fit in your pocket. The cost of phones I think is absurd, but on the other hand look what it is doing so there is a reasonable ROI. You can always buy a flip phone.

Sorry getting back on track - The adoption of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions is happening for many of the same reasons the smart phone has evolved to where it is today. The benefits of collapsing/converging servers, storage and network, as well as virtualizing the entire platform have an immediate positive ROI. When considering software and hardware maintenance, physical footprint power and cooling alone, it goes a long way in justifying the move.  The management of this solution is significantly simplified and requires less personnel to support it. Most of the offerings also have a scale out approach so you don’t have to rip and replace when you need additional storage and compute capacity as is the case for the legacy infrastructure – effectively extending the useful life of the asset.

The market acceptance and velocity of deployments of HCI solutions is similar to the adoption and deployment of server and storage virtualization solutions. The first virtualization vendor was VMware with ESX and then Microsoft with Hyper-V.  The current leader in the HCI in terms of nodes deployed is Nutanix. So I will use them as the HCI for this discussion. There are other notable players with their own success stories - Scale Computing (HC3), Pivot3 and of course Dell/EMC VxRail. Regardless of the HCI hardware components, all of these vendors require a hypervisor to manage the infrastructure.

There are a number of tier-1 hypervisors and at this time VMware ESXi is the most installed followed by Microsoft Hyper-V. Nutanix has their own Acropolis Hypervisor (AHS) which is included with the solution or the customer can elect to install ESXi. This really makes a ton of sense from Nutanix’s perspective since VMware is the dominant player in the virtualization space.

The folks that are migrating to the Nutanix platforms for the most part may have already gone through the virtualization exercise of their physical servers using VMware and all of the associated tools. This makes the learning curve a bit less steep in adopting an HCI solution in that they don’t have to learn a new hypervisor and the associated monitoring tools etc. I found that the majority of the Nutanix nodes deployed are running with VMware ESX.

There have been three major disruptions in the IT space – Virtualization, Cloud Adoption and Hyperconverged Infrastructure Solutions, and they could arguably be referred to as megatrends. Many will argue that there are other significant trends, but for the sake of this short article, I just want to illustrate how these trends specifically impacted the backup/restore marketplace.

The backup/restore market was disrupted significantly when virtualization began to be widely accepted and eventually mainstreamed.  The legacy backup/restore vendors at the time were not designed to efficiently and completely protect virtual machines and storage primarily. This is not meant to be disparaging at all. All of the backup/restore applications were designed specifically for physical machines. In that specific point in time virtual machines only existed in mainframe deployments.  

The disruption that was caused by VMware’s success in the server and storage virtualization market created a tremendous market opportunity (void) for someone who was able to create a purpose-built backup software solution for the virtual environment specifically the ESX hypervisor – enter Veeam in 2008.

The company released Veeam Backup & Replication, provided VMware vSphere VMs with incremental backups and image-based replication with built-in data deduplication and compression. Several years later they announced support of the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor. The rest is history and Veeam is the top backup software for the x86 virtualization marketplace to date.

The same disruption that was caused by server and storage virtualization to the backup/restore space has happened again. The velocity of the hyperconverged infrastructure adoption mirrors the adoption pace of server and storage virtualization adoption. Most of the HCI primary vendors are seeing year over year units shipped at a growth rate of 35%. 

So the current available backup solutions were developed on physical or virtual architecture platforms. The HCI space was hungry for a purpose-built backup solution to cater to the HCI architecture – enter HYCU 2017.

HYCU came to market with their initial HCI solution designed and purposefully built for Nutanix. In order to do that completely, they needed to support both the VMware ESXi and AHS hypervisors. In addition to the HCI space, HYCU is focused on protecting data in the hybrid cloud space as well as multi-cloud space. Their current offering is focused on Google Cloud service and Nutanix.

When you start to look at the HYCU solution by itself, it becomes thought provoking as to where this technology will go. The history of HYCU is a compelling reason to look at their solution. Comtrade Software Relaunches as Operationally Independent HYCU

Please visit us at Strategic Storage Solutions to learn more about HYCU, and download the eBook “Why HYCU is the Next Generation Backup for HCI.”