HYCU Launches Native Kubernetes Container Data Protection

‘When it comes to modern applications, data today is residing in multiple repositories. Customers need a way to manage all that. HYCU has a solution that scales and can be delivered as-a-service, and now we’re adding Kubernetes,’ says Subbiah Sundaram, HYCU’s vice president of products.

Multi-cloud data protection-as-a-service technology developer HYCU on Thursday added native Kubernetes data protection to its flagship platform.

The new version of that platform, HYCU Protege for Kubernetes, is the IT industry’s first native as-a-service offering for Kubernetes workloads, said Subbiah Sundaram, vice president of products for the Boston-based vendor.

“When it comes to modern applications, data today is residing in multiple repositories,” Sundaram told CRN. “Customers need a way to manage all that. HYCU has a solution that scales and can be delivered as-a-service, and now we’re adding Kubernetes.”

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Sundaram, citing statistics from analyst firm Gartner, said that 85 percent of global organizations are expected to be using containerized applications by 2025. However, he said, modernizing applications for the cloud takes a long time to do.

“Doing it at one scoop is hard,” he said. “So partners and customers are doing it in parts with containers. But when you look at containers, and at Kubernetes, you may see some storage vendors buying container companies. We want to offer a single solution for containers, virtualization, file services, object storage, and more.”

HYCU Protege for Kubernetes is HYCU’s answer to the situation Sundaram outlined. The free upgrade to HUCU Protege provides for automated and instantaneous discovery of applications, Sundaram said. “Customers don’t care about containers,” he said. “They care about the application.”

It also provides assured data protection with set-and-forget, policy-based data protection. “This is important when customers are using thousands of nodes,” he said. “At that scale, it’s the only way to handle it.”

With HYCU Protege for Kubernetes, customers can set different SLAs, or service level agreements, for applications within the same cluster, Sundaram said.

It also allows for granular recovery of applications, individual persistent disks, or configuration files. “With Kubernetes, a single application can have 20 to 30 configurations,” he said. “Kubernetes is very complicated.”

HYCU Protege for Kubernetes also brings one-click validation of cross-cluster recovery, and simplifies the test/dev and disaster recovery process with cross-project and cross-region cloning with simple one-click recovery, he said.

HYCU also natively brings to Kubernetes the data protection capabilities of HYCU Protege, including native IAM (AWS Identity and Access Management) integration, multi-tenancy management, multi-region disaster recovery, and auto-tiering of storage based on customers’ SLAs, Sundaram said.

“And we add self-service,” he said. “When you have hundreds of developers working, you don’t want developers to call the backup guy every time they need to recover something,” he said. “Now they can log in and see their own apps, making it easy for them to recover those apps when needed.”

Extreme Solution originally started working with HYCU for its ability to do data protection in virtualized environments, and was an early user of HYCU Protege for Kubernetes, said Sherif Kozman, CEO of the Irvine, Calif.-based solution provider.

“We rode the cloud journey early, when most of our clients were in virtualized environments,” Kozman told CRN. “But the market is now moving towards cloud-native applications. HYCU’s Kubernetes offering is an easy-to-offer cloud-native backup for Kubernetes.”

The main challenge when working in cloud environments is that traditional backup and disaster recovery technologies are not fit for Kubernetes, Kozman said.

“So it is amazing to find a supplier with a solution that requires minimum change or invasion,” he said. “We’re already deploying it with a couple of our long-time customers in education and in media and entertainment.”

Both those customers have large Kubernetes clusters, and so backup has always been a challenge for them, Kozman said.

“We applied HYCU Protege for Kubernetes a couple of months ago, and it has been working fine,” he said. “We also added some planned faults to test it, and it worked well.”

Prior to HYCU Protege for Kubernetes, adding data protection to those environments required scripted solutions, Kozman said.

“That takes a lot of time, and is prone to error,” he said. “With HYCU, customers are getting fully-managed, full-automated solutions that just work.”

HYCU Protege for Kubernetes went into general availability Thursday. It is a native part of the HYCU Protege platform, and included at no extra charge, Sundaram said. Existing HYCU Protege deployments will be automatically updated, he said.