Commvault Extends Support To Nutanix Files

Enhances Integration With The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Ecosystem

As of V11 SP15, made available March 15, 2019, Commvault Complete™ Backup and Recovery will include a tightly integrated protection solution for Nutanix Files. The obvious question is: what is Nutanix Files?

Nutanix Files is a scale-out file storage solution that leverages the Nutanix HCI architecture to deliver enterprise capabilities, radical simplicity and cloud-like flexibility for your unstructured data. Nutanix Files can be deployed as a standalone solution or as part of a Nutanix AOS cluster with a single click. Under the hood, virtual machines are automatically created to serve up file shares from the Nutanix Prism interface. Performance and capacity can be scaled as needed via that same Prism interface. Shares can be made available via CIFS or NFS to end users depending on the need of the user community. A single Nutanix Files share can be accessed by CIFS and NFS simultaneously for those environments with mixed Linux and Windows machines. For more information, please check out the Nutanix Files site to dig deeper.

Nutanix Files data can be “protected” within the cluster using Nutanix snapshots of the Files data. Individual files/folders can be recovered from these snapshots. While these snapshots can help meet aggressive recovery point and time objectives, they remain within the Nutanix. Where recovery outside of the Nutanix Files Cluster is required, Commvault provides extensive granular recovery options, restoration from any copy stored anywhere, and recovery of data in place or to any location within your enterprise.

Nutanix provides a Change File Tracking (CFT) API for Nutanix Files, which Commvault has fully integrated with, to help quickly identify which files need to be included within incremental data protection operations. This allows Commvault to dramatically reduce the scan time associated with incremental operations, which has long been a problem with large file system or NAS backup operations. CFT is available for both CIFS and NFS Nutanix Files shares. 

The ability to protect Nutanix Files data to a secondary storage platform – like Commvault HyperScale™ or another Nutanix Cluster running Commvault software – provides a powerful layer of security. For Nutanix Files data, as is the case with all data management within Commvault, protected data can be tiered to secondary copies on-premises or even in the cloud.

This tiered protection and copy strategy enables recovery flexibility for administrators. In place recoveries to the original Nutanix Files environment or out of place to a secondary Nutanix Files environment are possible. Recoveries to non-Nutanix environments, when required, are also possible from any of the protected copies managed by Commvault whether on-premises or in the cloud. Data can even be made available, if needed, directly from the Commvault ContentStore allowing for near-zero recovery time objectives.

Finally, all Nutanix Files data protected by Commvault is eligible to be ingested using Commvault Activate™ so that the data is indexed and made available for deep content-based searches. Commvault Activate integration can be used to enable internal auditors or compliance officers the ability to review the Nutanix Files environment where and when necessary.

All of the above is generally available within Commvault v11 SP15, made available March 15, 2019.

To sum up the support:

• CIFS and NFS Nutanix Files share support
• Change File Tracking (CFT) API integration
• Autodiscovery of Nutanix Files Data
• Snapshot based protection
• Extensive Granular Recovery options (Files, Folders, Versions, and more)
• Commvault Storage Policy integration allowing backup data to be stored onsite, offsite, or in the cloud
• Recovery back into the original Nutanix Files share or any location addressable by Commvault
• Nutanix Files data can be made available through Commvault Activate
• And more