Navigating Disasters and the Art of Scalable Recovery: Multicloud Snapshot Technology with Pilot Light Deployment

Organizations everywhere use some form of  snapshots to protect their workloads , but not all snapshots serve the same purpose. Some snapshots are essential for immediate recovery, while others are maintained merely for compliance or redundancy. This makes customizability a crucial factor for customers. Equally important is the location where these snapshots are stored, whether in highly available recovery clusters or cost-efficient object storage, highlighting the importance of data mobility.

The 2024 Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index highlights that “80% of organizations believe hybrid IT environments are most beneficial to their ability to manage applications and data.” Nutanix Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) helps customers in achieving their hybrid cloud aspirations by migrating snapshots from on-premises systems to AWS S3, providing a smarter way to handle data. By utilizing S3-compatible storage, businesses can optimize their storage usage, ensure RPO and RTO requirements are met,  while  delivering reliable disaster recovery, simplified management, and seamless data mobility between on-premises, cloud, and edge environments and S3.

What is MST DR with Pilot Light Deployment?

Think about a gas fireplace, it usually turns on with the click of a button and turn of a key, right? Behind the scenes, there is a mini flame that is always ready to ignite the entire fireplace, when you need it. Similarly a pilot light cluster is a cluster that is ready to fire up and scale out on your command, commonly in the case of a failover. 

The Nutanix Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) with Pilot Light deployment efficiently replicates snapshots from your active compute cluster to object stores and fails back to a pilot light cluster that scales out to accommodate all workloads during failover. Today MST DR with Pilot Light deployment supports AWS S3, with other S3 compliant object stores coming soon. 

Let’s delve into the key benefits of MST DR with Pilot Light Deployment that can help strengthen your business continuity strategy.

Maximized Storage Efficiency with S3-Compliant Object Stores

MST Disaster Recovery with Pilot Light enables you to leverage S3 buckets for storing workload snapshots. By offloading these snapshots to cost-effective S3-compliant object stores, you can free up your primary storage for high-performance workloads. These object stores not only optimize your storage performance, but also offer robust security features. By securely archiving snapshots in immutable, WORM-enabled S3-compliant object stores, MST DR with Pilot Light deployment allows you to comply with regulatory requirements. 

Optimized TCO and Maximize your Budget 

In legacy setups, organizations maintain empty nodes that are paid for and are perpetually running, just to be ready in the worst case scenario.  In the MST DR deployment, the pilot cluster reduces the need for idle nodes, allowing you to free up and reallocate your budget more efficiently, not to mention the built-in cost saving by using a lower cost S3 compliant object store. 

Seamless Data Mobility for Reliable Recovery

MST DR with Pilot Light deployment provides seamless data mobility to S3 buckets, minimizing procurement and setup time due to its cloud-based nature. MST enables application-centric snapshots to be stored in object storage with the ability to recover anywhere Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) solution runs: cloud, edge, and on-premises.

In addition to streamlined data mobility, failover management with MST is also highly intuitive. After pairing the MST target with the primary location, you can effortlessly set up protection policies and recovery plans to direct snapshots to object stores and easily configure failover using the familiar DR UI workflows. This ensures a smooth rehydration of snapshots from MST targets during planned, unplanned, or test failover scenarios.

Unified Control with Nutanix Prism

MST DR with Pilot Light Deployment is no exception to the simplified management Nutanix has to offer. MST DR uses the same prism management plane as other NCP solutions, and integrates seamlessly with existing Nutanix Disaster Recovery (DR) engine policies and recovery plans that are in use. 

We are very excited about this new era of highly customizable disaster recovery solutions and expect to pave the way for long-term success for our customers. Nutanix is not just about technology, we are dedicated to elevating your experience and growing to meet your changing needs.

Ready to get started? Check out the step by step guide here!

To learn more about how to get started with MST Disaster Recovery with Pilot Light Deployment today and what's coming in future releases, please reach out to your account manager or contact mst-help@nutanix.com.

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