Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced several new capabilities in its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software and AHV hypervisor to protect business-critical applications and maintain continuous business operations in the face of a possible disaster. New capabilities include advanced automation for recovering applications and data, support for seamless multi-site disaster recovery (DR), synchronous replication for workloads running on AHV, and a near-zero data loss with “near sync” replication for recovery point objective (RPO) times of approximately 20 seconds.

At a time when business continuity is more important than ever, ensuring businesses have strong recovery policies and procedures is no longer a “nice to have.” However, customers looking to implement strong DR plans for critical applications, such as those supporting emergency services, had little choice but to deploy complex, often disparate technologies that demand specialised, on-going administration. The new capabilities in Nutanix HCI and AHV help enable customers to confidently deliver mission-critical applications with significantly less complexity and lower management overhead.

“Maintaining continuous business operations is a high priority for all types of companies and organisations,” said Greg Smith, VP of Product Marketing at Nutanix. “However, most businesses rely on custom, handcrafted DR implementations to guard against system-wide IT failures. Nutanix now natively delivers automated, easy-to-deploy disaster recovery solutions built to deliver applications that must always be available.”

New capabilities to simplify and automate DR efforts include:

Multi-Site Disaster Recovery: Nutanix now supports multi-site DR designs, helping enable enterprises to quickly recover from the simultaneous failure of two or more data centres while keeping applications and data available to users. Particularly valuable in regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, and emergency services where organisations need to deliver uninterrupted service, Nutanix DR leverages advanced automation technology to eliminate the complexity of DR installation and ongoing orchestration. Application teams can quickly recover from unplanned outages or data corruption and set configurations to adhere to many stringent compliance requirements.

Unmatched Near Sync Disaster Recovery: Nutanix now supports near sync replication with an RPO of only about 20 seconds, a 3x improvement from its already industry-leading technology. Nutanix is the only leading HCI vendor to offer a 20-second RPO. 

Synchronous Data Replication for Nutanix AHV: Synchronous replication, or the nearly instantaneous replication of data between multiple locations, is now natively supported on the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. AHV can be used by customers to deliver a highly available service for their most important workloads, such as virtual desktop infrastructure, databases, and general server virtualisation.

DR Orchestration with Runbooks: The latest release gives customers more flexibility and control over the end-to-end recovery process, with more granular control to focus DR resources toward targeted applications. 

“Our business users expect a zero recovery point objective, which guarantees no data loss when a failover occurs following a datacenter outage,” said Delfim Da Costa, System and Infrastructure Manager at Infomil, an IT spin-off of a large European retailer and a Nutanix customer since 2015. “We are delighted to now use Nutanix’s AHV virtualisation and to maintain the highest possible SLA for our production workloads.” 

These new DR capabilities are included in the Nutanix HCI software and are generally available. More information on Nutanix business continuity and disaster recovery solutions are available here.