While giants sleep. HYCU sneaks into Nutanix and Google Cloud Platform backup

Enterprise backup is a huge and overcrowded market. But HYCU, a new arrival on the block, thinks it has found a couple of lucrative backwaters that are underserved by competitors.

The company has set out its backup software stall for Nutanix and Google Cloud Platform.

HYCU was spun out of Comtrade, a Boston, Mass. technology holding group, in April 2018. There are some 300 HYCU employees, including 200 engineers, and a 700-strong customer base.

HYCU’s go-to market challenge is to grow without engaging in bruising full-frontal warfare with well-established and rich competitors.

The chosen strategy, CEO Simon Taylor reveals, is to find under-served areas with backup growth potential, get close and stay close with a purpose-built offering.  The company thinks two technologies fit these criteria: Nutanix and Google Cloud Platform (see my 2017 HYCU-Nutanix article).

Even in its chosen markets, HYCU has plenty of competition. For instance, for Nutanix backup, competitor Arcserve has integrated its UDP protection product with Nutanix’s AHV hypervisor. Rubrik’s Alta software release last year also features AHV support.

How to cover a LOB

HYCU thinks a single backup product to cover all use cases won’t work and isn’t working.

For instances lines of business (LOBs) within companies are gaining more purchasing power and are buying their own data protection products. And trend for LOBs is to embrace a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy, 

That means data protection has become less sticky and LOBs are increasingly willing to switch to best of breed backup products that suit them, according to HYCU.

Market research appears to support HYCU’s thesis.  A survey published in November 2018 reveals enterprises are using several backup vendors. 

So. no one-size fits all backup vendor exists. What instead? HYCU’s Taylor says you need workload products purpose-built for individual on-premises and cloud applications, unified under a single management layer. 

HYCU management dashboard

HYCU has unified management of its purpose-built backup products under a single, central pane of glass management. 

V3.5 release

A v3.5 update of HYCU’s Nutanix software adds support for systems running SAP HANA. HYCU says it’s the first supplier to provide storage-level snapshots for SAP HANA workloads on Nutanix. Customers can also get clones of their SAP HANA environments with a button click.

The latest version supports Volume Groups (block) as well as files (AFS), objects and virtual machines. Volume Groups are used by Nutanix performance-sensitive applications.

Blueprints provide 1-click provisioning of an entire backup infrastructure on a Nutanix storage node.

HYCU has added backup support for Microsoft SQL Failover Cluster, without the need for any agents.