Hyperconverged Secondary Storage

I had the opportunity to meet with Greg Smith, VP of Product Marketing at Nutanix, during the .Next user conference, where they introduced Nutanix Mine, a new open solution that integrates secondary storage operations with the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, delivering a complete platform for primary and secondary storage within the private cloud.

Through native integration with industry-leading backup vendors Veeam, HYCU, Commvault, Veritas, and Unitrends, customers will be able to manage their hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) environment and backup operations from a single management console, reducing the operational cost and complexity of standalone back-up and recovery solutions.

Mine streamlines overall deployment and simplifies the full lifecycle of data backup operations, including on-going management, scaling and troubleshooting while preserving the customer’s freedom to choose the right back-up service for their particular infrastructure environment.

According to Gartner, “There are many challenges with current backup and recovery solutions deployed today. The top concerns are most often related to the cost, complexity, and capability.” Gartner goes on to state, “These costs often continue to rise despite overall cost improvements in the IT industry, and many organizations continue to perceive backup as an expensive insurance policy."

As companies modernize their datacenter with HCI to realize the simplicity, performance, and scalability needed to run modern applications, their backup and data protection strategies have remained siloed from their core datacenter environment. With Mine, customers will be able to converge secondary storage operations into the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform to deliver intelligent data backup services for all business applications. Integrated with Nutanix’s native HCI data fabric that provides tiering and advanced data reduction capabilities, Mine will enable enterprises to choose the best data backup software for their organization, optimized for their HCI environment; reducing the time and expense of configuring standalone secondary storage solutions.

“Backup and recovery strategies are often regarded as a painful necessity for most businesses because of their complexity and lack of integration into the overall IT infrastructure. Even more modern solutions, which tout the same customer-centric principles of hyper-converged infrastructure, only address the challenges of the secondary storage environment,” said Phil Goodwin, Research Director, Cloud Data Management for Protection at IDC. “With more applications and use cases converging on a single platform within the private cloud, integrating secondary storage tightly with primary data center operations introduces even more flexibility and ease-of-use for customers.”

According to the Veeam executives I spoke with at the conference, their clients are saving 20 to 30% on configuration and management versus a legacy system. As such, the ROI around smoother, faster, and more efficient operations is dramatic and they are doing a lot of work with federal, state, and local governments with significant technical debt and significant legacy infrastructure.

“As companies modernize their datacenter, they look to new solutions which make it easy to run business-critical applications, eliminating silos and reducing complexity in their private cloud environment so IT can serve as the foundation of business success,” said Carey Stanton, Vice President of Global Alliances at Veeam. “By integrating our software so closely with Nutanix through Mine, we’re delivering our joint customers a full platform for their primary and secondary storage needs, dramatically reducing the complexity of running and protecting applications.”

Embracing an open platform strategy, Nutanix Mine will integrate with popular back-up solutions from Veeam, HYCU, Commvault, Veritas, and Unitrends. Through tight integration with Nutanix’s HCI data fabric and advanced Prism management console, Mine will:

• Reduce the complexity of separate systems to back-up and recover business data, so secondary storage can be managed as easily as primary data storage

• Simplify the full lifecycle of data backup operations, including initial sizing and procurement, streamlined installation, and easy provisioning of the full solution, and

•  Easily scale-out both primary and secondary storage to accommodate business growth

“The hyper-converged market’s rapid growth is largely attributable to its promise of modernizing infrastructure and reducing complexity by eliminating silos within the datacenter. But even as customers embraced HCI, the secondary storage silo persisted,” said Sunil Potti, Chief Product and Development Officer, Nutanix. “With Nutanix Mine, customers will get all the benefits of collapsing this silo into a single platform - reduced management complexity, simplified operations, and reduced TCO - without the requirement that they forgo the backup solution best suited for their business needs.”

(1) Gartner, “Report Highlight for Market Trends: Expand Your Software-Defined Storage Market by Leveraging Backup and Archiving”, by Santanu Patro, July 2018, ID G00367503