Comtrade Software Inc., which has bet its business on the Nutanix Inc. hyperconverged platform, has spun off from its corporate parent and rebranded itself with the name of its flagship data protection software.

The new HYCU Inc. also announced new features that support Nutanix Acropolis File Services and enable data protection across both Nutanix and non-Nutanix environments.

HYCU, for Hyperconverged Uptime, complements Nutanix’s native data protection capabilities with storage-specific features like snapshots, clones, replicas, compression, and de-duplication. The company said its software can be installed in minutes and provide protection at both the application and the system level.

“We are pure software that runs right on the platform, takes three minutes to deploy and can backup to any [network-attached storage] as well as the cloud,” said Subbiah Sundaram, HYCU’s vice president of products. “We’re the only [data protection provider] that’s taken advantage of Nutanix APIs and file services, is natively integrated and application-aware.”

HYCU set up shop only about 18 months ago as the U.S. wing of the Serbia-based systems integrator ComTrade Group. It only builds software for the Nutanix platform. “We view Nutanix as the future of the data center,” said Chief Executive Simon Taylor.

The decision to rebrand was driven by the need to move more quickly and attract talent with incentives such as stock options. Being independent also gives HYCU more options to raise funding on its own. “We see this as positioning ourselves for future growth in a wide variety of ways,” Taylor said. ComTrade Group remains the majority shareholder and is “actively committed to supporting our success,” he said.

New support for non-Nutanix environments is mainly intended to help customers migrate to the Nutanix platform. It’s enabled through VMware Inc.’s vSphere backup so that users can gradually move applications and virtual machines to a Nutanix platform without business disruption.

“They can continue with their existing VMware environment, with HYCU protecting it,” Sundaram said. “We’ll give them a full clone of their production environment on Nutanix for test and development. When they have their next version ready to go into production, they you can clone the test environment into development.”

Support for AFS backup and recovery addresses the often arduous process of backing up at the file level. HYCU provides agentless file backup using Nutanix Change File Tracking application program interfaces. The company said its approach slashes backup times to a small fraction of their usual time. It also leverages the scale-out features of HYCU and AFS to perform backups in parallel.

Other new features in this release include support for Oracle Corp., databases and self-service recovery for service providers.

Image: theCUBE