In today’s business world where new technologies constantly come to market, there are signs that indicate when certain ones are gaining broader market adoption and ready to go mainstream. Such an event occurred this month when a backup solution purpose built for Nutanix was announced.
This product minimized the need for users of Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure solution to parse through multiple product to find the right backup solution for them. Now they can turn to Comtrade Software’s HYCU software confident that will get a backup solution purpose-built to protect VMs and applications residing on the Nutanix Acropolis hyperconverged infrastructure platform.
In the history of every new platform that comes to market, certain tipping points occur that validate and accelerate its adoption. One such event is the availability of other products built specifically to run on that platform that make it more practical and/or easier for users of that platform to derive more value from it. Such an event for the Nutanix Acropolis platform occurred this month when Comtrade Software brought its HYCU backup software to market which is specifically designed to protect VMs and applications running on the Nutanix Acropolis hyperconverged platform.
The availability of this purpose-built data protection solution from Comtrade Software for Nutanix is significant in three ways.
- It signifies that the number of companies adopting hyperconverged infrastructures solutions has reached critical mass in the market place and that this technology is poised for larger growth.
- It would suggest that current backup solutions do not deliver the breadth of functionality that administrators of hyperconverged infrastructure solution need; that they cost too much; that they are too complicated to use; or some combination of all three.
- It indirectly validates that Nutanix is the market leader in providing hyperconverged infrastructure solutions as Comtrade placed its bets on first bringing a solution to market that addresses the specific backup and recovery challenges that Nutanix users face.
Considering that the Comtrade Software’s HYCU is just out of the gate, it offers a significant amount of functionality that make it a compelling data protection solution for any Nutanix deployment. One of Comtrade’s design goals was to make it is simple as possible to deploy and manage backup over time in Nutanix environments. While this is typically the goal of every product that comes to market, Comtrade Software’s HYCU stands apart with its ability to detect the application running inside of each VM.
One of the challenges that administrators routinely face is the lack of ability to easily discern what applications run inside a VM without first tracking down the owner of that VM and/or the application owner to obtain that information. In the demo I saw of HYCU, it mitigates the need to chase down these individuals as it can look inside of a VM to identify which application and operating system it hosts. Once it has this information, the most appropriate backup policies for that VM may be assigned.
Equally notable about the Comtrade Software HYCU product is its management interface. Rather than presenting and requiring administrators to learn a new management interface to perform backups and recoveries, it presents a management interface that closely if not exactly replicates the one used by Nutanix.
Every platform that attains broad acceptance in the marketplace reaches a point where partners come alongside it and begin to offer solutions either built upon it or that do a better job of performing certain tasks such as data protection and recovery. Comtrade Software offering its HYCU data protection software serves as a bellwether for where Nutanix sits in the hyperconverged market place. By coming to market when it has, Comtrade Software positions its HYCU offering as the front runner in this emerging space as it currently has no other competitors that offer purpose-built backup software for Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure deployments.