Nutanix Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Simple, nimble and reliable native business-continuity solution
One hour of downtime can cost an organization as much as $1 billion in financial damages, and days or even weeks to recover and restore business operations. Disasters, disruptions, maintenance, and audits are inevitable, but the impact on business operations can be minimized with the right infrastructure technology.
Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) has a natively integrated Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) solution that combines disaster recovery (DR) and data protection (DP) under one umbrella. Nutanix BCDR gets your applications up and running with minimal downtime and data loss. It also helps customers avoid disruption by providing failover and failback for compute and storage with a range of recovery point objective (RPO) choices.
Nutanix Disaster Recovery has helped us to shorten the time required to recover data from at least half a day to just one hour. We will now set a higher goal in hopes of achieving an RTO of 15 minutes in the very near future.
Nutanix Data Protection
Data Protection prioritizes the security of data in the face of potential corruption, deletion and other unfortunate errors. With data expanding at an exponential rate, the risk of compromise also increases. Every weak point in data storage presents an opportunity for malicious actors to exploit it, highlighting the importance of robust data protection measures. Data protection encompasses both backup and replication activities.
Comprehensive Backup with Partner Ecosystem
Backup refers to the process of creating a copy of data to recover from data loss or corruption. Nutanix works closely with our partner ecosystem to provide a comprehensive backup solution based on customers’ needs.
Backup integration consists of two tiers:
- Comprehensive API support: Nutanix provides backup-focused APIs for seamless integration with our backup partners' solutions, enabling highly cohesive joint offerings.
- Primary storage compatibility: Backup partners have the option to utilize Nutanix Objects as the principal storage solution and often recommend Nutanix Objects for customer backup storage needs.
A widely recognized best practice in the industry, the 3-2-1 rule for backups calls for maintaining three copies of data stored in two different locations while the third copy is stored offsite. This safeguards data integrity by providing tiered backups in the event of compromise to the primary data source. It is particularly important to aid in compliance with industry regulations such as the upcoming Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).
Integrated Replication With a Wide Range of RPOs
Data replication maintains multiple copies of the same data across various locations to increase data resilience and availability. Nutanix provides integrated replication capabilities with flexible RPOs that enable you to customize your DR solution based on the specific needs of workloads. Business continuity plans may tolerate varying levels of data loss, and Nutanix offers options that meet these requirements.
- Synchronous replication ensures a 0 second RPO, where two copies of data are captured in real-time between production and recovery sites, minimizing the risk of data loss in the event of a disruption.
- Nearsync replication offers a 1-15 minute RPO, which provides a balance between data consistency and performance, suitable for a wide range of applications.
- Asynchronous replication supports RPOs ranging from 1 hour to 24 hours, which is suitable for workloads where data consistency is less critical and business objectives can tolerate some loss of data.
Furthermore, the recent introduction of Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) enables cost-effective storage of snapshots on S3-compatible object stores. This provides flexible data mobility and ensures compliance with regulatory mandates for lower priority workloads.
Disaster Recovery
DR constitutes a crucial component of the BCDR strategy, focused on restoring production clusters swiftly in the event of disruptions. The fundamental elements of Nutanix Disaster Recovery include:
- Non-disruptive DR testing: Nutanix enables organizations to conduct DR testing without impacting day-to-day operations. This allows businesses to validate failover and failback strategies with confidence to ensure DR readiness and effectiveness without risking downtime or data loss.
- Cross hypervisor DR: Nutanix supports cross-hypervisor DR, allowing seamless failover and failback between ESXi and AHV clusters. With just one click within the Nutanix Prism data protection workflow, organizations can efficiently migrate workloads between different hypervisor environments to enhance flexibility and agility in DR operations.
- Flexibility in deployment models: Nutanix Disaster Recovery is available in multiple deployment models to give organizations greater flexibility in how they deploy and manage their DR solution. This ensures that businesses can choose the model that best fits their operational and budgetary requirements, whether it's through subscription-based services, on-premises or in the cloud.
Nutanix DR offers a robust and adaptable solution to help organizations mitigate risks, maintain business continuity, and protect data and applications in the event of disruptions.
Nutanix Disaster Recovery is a part of the core Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) licensing and is available to all Nutanix customers. Backup powered by our technology alliance partners is available through Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) licensing. Please reach out to your account manager to learn how to get started.