Do you see the world as a holistic common ground across the landscape? Or do you tend to look at each thing as its entity? This might seem like a rather strange entry into how we approach solutions such as backups, disaster recovery, migrations, etc., in our industry. But I think this is important as we approach how we manage different clouds from a framework and automation perspective. This is something that stands out to me when we look at how HYCU chose to develop its solution around each cloud and keep the nativeness of each one, but at the same time, provide an agnostic consumption model.
Backup and Migration Solutions Should Be Agnostic
Providing and managing backup solutions in most cases can be highly complex and challenging. And when providing these solutions in a more DevOps-friendly manner, solutions tend to fall short. These shortcomings tend to be because more time is spent on how the backend functionality looks and feels for an admin rather than focusing on both the admin experience and the consumer’s experience.
As an example scenario to expand on the consumer experience, let’s say I am a developer with an application that requires numerous VMware vSphere VMs within my on-prem data center. My VMs and application deployment is an entirely automated solution because I do not want to do anything manually and have a consistent deployment model. And as part of my solution, I want to ensure that my applications and, more specifically, my VMs are backed up in case I need to restore them or migrate them to another cloud provider. Because I am the consumer of the provided backup solution, I do not want to or need to understand the backend specifics of how, where, or anything else those targets need to be. And more importantly, what if those backend targets change? Then I would need to change my backup targets to fit the specifics required to ensure that my solution was protected. This would turn into a never-ending challenge over time and something I should not be concerned about.
In a perfect world, I should be able to define my backup and recovery policy and let the solution handle any translation required, regardless of what the backend targets are or even if they change. This functionality ensures that the experience is always the same and consistent from a consumer perspective, therefore wholly agnostic.
HYCU Protégé
During a recent Tech Field Day Showcase, HYCU presented their Protégé product, specifically their Amazon AWS support, and how you can leverage AWS as a target for your backups, migrations, disaster recovery, and others for your on-premises cloud, such as VMware vSphere.
HYCU Protégé provides support for native VM capabilities and equally as much application-level awareness capabilities. These capabilities can be for backups, migrations, and disaster recovery. The one thing that stood out to me is that they do not require an agent (agentless) to be installed on the source. From what I gathered, the only requirement was a username/password and SSH for Linux and WinRM for Windows.
Application awareness capabilities are something else that was intriguing, but not because this is something new. It was the fact that it sounded like there may be some application mapping capabilities that could be tapped into. However, we didn’t dive into that too much.
HYCU Handles the Translation Layer
Regarding the administration of the backend targets, it is highly flexible. They provide the ability to define specific policies that can make decisions on things such as which cloud provider to use as a target and even furthermore allow them to be swapped out at any given time. This functionality is highly beneficial because as things change over time and require backend changes, the consumer never needs to worry about changing anything.
Conclusion
For these reasons, I believe HYCU has nailed it! By providing a holistic and agnostic solution, it has removed a ton of complexity and added a ton of functionality at the same time. The functionality they’ve provided as part of their translation layer is game-changing and a much-needed approach in the industry as we move further towards a more agnostic world of consuming products and solutions.
To see the full presentation from HYCU, check out our Showcase page on the Tech Field Day website.
