A backup strategy must be integrated into any organization’s workflows to provide data recovery opportunities in case of data loss events. Nutanix AHV provides powerful virtualization capabilities to organizations of any scale and type in order to improve data protection efficiency.
What is Nutanix AHV?
Nutanix allows you to build a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). The Nutanix platform can run on top of infrastructure nodes or servers, bundling storage, network and internal memory. Thus, you can run virtual machines (VMs) with the use of the Nutanix hypervisor and also optimize performance within a single solution. The use of various servers makes Nutanix redundant by default: in case a node is down due to an error, apps remain stable and unaffected.
Nutanix AHV has the multi-platform deployment as one of its main advantages. The system can run in any environment, including:
- On-premise deployments
- Cloud infrastructures
- On-premises + cloud (hybrid infrastructure)
- Multiple cloud nodes (multi-cloud)
Activities like adding and removing servers or forming a cluster according to an organization’s needs are easy and straightforward. Nutanix can scale together with the development of your organization, balancing managerial effort and financial expenses as you grow. Consequently, Nutanix backup can be the perfect solution for the lifecycle of numerous projects, optimizing your costs and resources as you need.
Key Benefits of Nutanix Backup Solutions
Organizations worldwide tend to consider hybrid cloud infrastructures as something secondary, assisting and fulfilling the private cloud deployments that a particular organization has. Nevertheless, the differences between public and private cloud infrastructures (and between various public cloud infrastructures as well) demand your IT department professionals to spend resources and time to gain management competencies for every separate environment.
As a multiplatform solution, Nutanix enables working with private, distributed and public cloud infrastructures. Thus, IT specialists who know how to use Nutanix can manage both traditional and new apps efficiently. Nutanix can extend between different clouds enabling you to move applications and VMs without the need to implement new tools, licensing or workflows.
Advanced Nutanix backup solutions allow you to reduce system downtime after failures or updates. Consolidating backup workflows into a solution that has native integration with hybrid environment and multi-cloud support features helps you streamline data protection management, boost recovery speeds and improve overall system efficiency.
Data Backup and Recovery
Modern data protection solutions are capable of dealing with the effects of cyber threats such as ransomware and minimizing the risks of data loss in case of a disruptive event. You can easily recover data from backups to resume your operations and ensure business continuity.
Nutanix Disaster Recovery and DRaaS
To minimize downtime and ensure little to no data loss for both on-premises and cloud workloads, consider implementing a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) strategy. Nutanix does not require much time and effort to deploy, configure and manage. Disaster recovery settings can be flexibly adapted to an organization’s RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective). Nutanix also streamlines management activities by enabling the control of clouds and hypervisors from a common UI.
Flexibility and Scalability
Flexibility is a known advantage of cloud infrastructures in general, thus Nutanix can offer in-depth customization of storage and balancing the costs. At the start of your organization’s development, you can pick a small backup storage option to avoid overpaying for unnecessary volumes. With the growth of an organization and the expansion of both production and backup data volumes, create additional storage repositories whenever required.
Additionally, modern Nutanix backup solutions enable simple data and app replication at local sites, remote Nutanix sites or public clouds. Consequently, your infrastructure becomes even more scalable and flexible.
Best Practices for Using a Nutanix Backup Solution
Implementing a Nutanix backup solution in your organization’s environment is the first step to strengthening data protection, reducing downtime and improving cost efficiency. Still, you need to consider some critical points when developing a data backup and recovery strategy. Here are several practical tips for using Nutanix backup solutions effectively without overcomplicating your infrastructures and workflows.
Define Backup Policies and Schedules
The first thing to do when planning a backup strategy is to define what policies should be applied to particular data. The data that is critical usually has shorter RTOs (increasing the required computing resources and network bandwidth) and closer RPOs (meaning additional storage space requirements). This allows you to understand the priorities and calculate the hardware resources and finances that you will need to make your requirements achievable. Alternatively, you can consciously adapt your recovery objectives to maintain a balance between the requirements and current capabilities of your infrastructure and budget.
Automate and Orchestrate Backup Workflows
Nowadays, almost all organizations need to store large volumes of data to ensure proper functioning and income generation. Backup automation excludes the human factor to ensure that the workflows will run according to strategy and schedule. In turn, proper scheduling and orchestration help you optimize resources, and avoid backup overlaps and bottlenecks.
Test Your Backups
The worst moment to discover that your backups are unrecoverable is when the main site is down and the original data is already lost. To avoid such issues, choose the backup solution with the appropriate feature and implement regular backup testing workflows in your strategy. Just like backups and recovery sequences, testing can be automated. Moreover, modern backup solutions can test your backups without loading the production environment of your organization.
Ensure Data Security and Compliance
Although compliance and security requirements can differ in detail between countries, non-compliance and data breach can most likely lead to hefty fines. In your backup and recovery strategy, data security and compliance should be among the core elements. For example, you might want to:
- Ensure backup redundancy by following the renowned 3-2-1 rule: 3 backup copies on 2 different media with at least 1 copy kept offsite.
- Encrypt your backups in flight (during transfer) and at rest (throughout the retention period) to prevent unauthorized users from viewing your data.
- Ensure authorized access to backups by applying two-factor authentication (2FA) in addition to the standard login procedure.
- Find and recover particular data items directly from backups within minutes to satisfy compliance requirements.
Integrate Backups with Other Systems and Apps
Nutanix capabilities combined with those of a modern backup solution can help you seamlessly integrate data protection workflows into the infrastructure of any size and complexity. Configure backup and recovery sequences for any data from a single file or app to the entire infrastructure, control backup storage and ensure ransomware protection using a single UI panel. Simple but flexible management along with advanced automation features and customized strategy allows you to ensure that the data is accessible at all times.
Nutanix Backup with the NAKIVO Solution
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an agentless solution that allows you to perform incremental and app-aware backups of Nutanix AHV virtual machines. The solution can ensure the transactional consistency of your app data during backup workflows. With the support of the Nutanix Changed Regions Tracking technology, the solution from NAKIVO helps you save storage space and cut backup windows by copying only the changed data to backup repositories.
The solution has built-in data compression and deduplication functions to reduce backup sizes. LAN-free data transfer and network acceleration features can boost the speed of backup data transfer to ensure the top performance of your Nutanix backups. Advanced Bandwidth Throttling limits the bandwidth for backup jobs to prioritize backup and recovery of critical workloads even when the network is heavily loaded during working hours. Security and access management features such as backup immutability, role-based access control (RBAC) and two-factor authentication (2FA) help you keep backup data protected from cyber threats and unauthorized access.
You can try the NAKIVO Nutanix backup solution for free to evaluate the benefits of using an advanced data protection solution combined with Nutanix AHV flexible capabilities.
Conclusion
The hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) that you can build with Nutanix AHV is capable of uniting on-premise, cloud and hybrid environments to boost overall performance and management efficiency. However, you still need a Nutanix backup solution and strategy to reliably protect your organization’s data. The strategy is about defining backup policies along with schedules, enabling backup automation, orchestration, testing, and integration with your systems. To keep your Nutanix environments protected, consider integrating with an all-in-one backup and recovery solution such as NAKIVO Backup & Replication.
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