HYCU Makes Official Debut as HCI Data Protection Provider

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Comtrade Software is now HYCU, a software company that provides enterprises with monitoring, backup and recovery solutions for their hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI).

We established a first-hand look at HYCU’s new upgrades and enhancements. Click here to see an in-depth product overview and insight to the new features.

Boston-based HYCU will operate independently from Comtrade Group, Comtrade Software’s parent company, an IT services and products company. Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU, previously served as Comtrade Group’s chief strategy officer and president of Comtrade Software.

Taylor is being joined by industry experts Scott Henderson and Junelle Swan. Henderson is the former vice president and head of sales at Egnyte, the Mountain View, Calif. file sharing and content governance specialist, and is now HYCU’s new vice president of Sales for the Americas. Swan arrives after stints at Quest Software and Citrix as a channel executive. She is now the vice president of Channels at HYCU. Comtrade Group is the new firm’s primary shareholder.

“This is one of those interesting situations where a parent company like Comtrade has been around and very successful in the background for nearly three decades without gaining a whole lot of name recognition,” said Steven Hill, senior analyst of Storage Technologies at 451 Research.

The move should bode well for HYCU, according to the industry watcher.

“Branching out as a new brand should give HYCU greater flexibility to focus on customer-facing engagements as well as build a far more public reputation in the data protection space,” Hill said. “With over 300 veteran employees and a strong history in the IT industry to their credit, HYCU should be able to hit the ground running.”

HYCU Upgrades

Coinciding with HYCU’s official debut as a company is the release of new enhancements to the HYCU Data Protection for Nutanix platform.

Among them is VMware vSphere backup functionality for ESX environments running on non-Nutanix setups. It’s a capability that can ease workload migrations to Nutanix’s HCI platform, potentially increasing adoption.

“When companies adopt Nutanix, odds are that they already have VMware,” noted Jerome Wendt, president and founder of DCIG, an IT analyst firm. HYCU is sending the message that the company “really [doesn’t] care what you run on,” said Wendt, but if customers want to eventually shift their workloads to Nutanix, the company’s backup software can help them protect their VMware applications and virtual machines ahead of an eventual migration.

There remains “a substantial number” of organizations seeking to continue running VMware on Nutanix, noted 451 Research analyst Hill. “There’s really no right or wrong, it’s about what’s best for the customer, so the next step for HYCU is extending the efficiencies of their Nutanix integration to VMware, or for that matter, any other production environment,” he stated.

“One of the strengths that HYCU inherits from Comtrade Software is deep experience in cross-platform integration, and given their exclusive focus on the Nutanix partnership, it will be really interesting to see what kind of doors they will open for greater Nutanix adoption,” Hill continued.

Also new is the general availability release of HYCU Data Protection for Nutanix’s AFS backup and recovery feature set. It allows users of Nutanix Acropolis File Services (AFS) to perform agentless backups of their file shares with no discernable impact on system performance.

The solution also casts a wider data-protection net, now covering Oracle databases in addition to existing support for Microsoft’s business application ecosystem. Finally, HYCU Data Protection for Nutanix enables self-service backup and recovery operations for an organization’s IT support personnel and service providers.

HYCU Data Protection for Nutanix is available now with prices starting at $1,500 per socket.

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Pedro Hernandez
Pedro Hernandez
Pedro Hernandez is a contributor to Datamation, eWEEK, and the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Previously, he served as a managing editor for the Internet.com network of IT-related websites and as the Green IT curator for GigaOM Pro.

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