Google Cloud courts Actifio, HYCU for data protection

While Google made a big deal of working with open source software companies at its Google Cloud Next Conference, it also has been lining up data protection partners.

Secondary storage management vendor Cohesity, copy data management ace Actifio and HYCU all launched or expanded Google Cloud Platform (GCP) data protection services. Cohesity Cloud Backup Service, Actifio GO for Google Cloud Platform and HYCU Backup as a Service for Google Cloud Platform are all available on GCP Marketplace.

Cohesity and Actifio already partner with other public cloud providers. HYCU added data protection for Google Cloud SQL to the backup as a service it launched for Google Cloud Platform a year ago.

HYCU (pronounced Haiku) is best known for providing backup software for Nutanix because, well, it started out with Nutanix backup as its only product. HYCU CEO Simon Taylor said HYCU has more than 1,000 customers for its software and its Nutanix business is strong, but partnered with Google after Google approached his company about developing GCP data protection.

“When we first started this, people were confused – ‘So maybe you’ve re-routed things, or you’re using GCP as a target or found a way to back up from Google to Nutanix, or Nutanix to Google,’” Taylor said. “The way to think about this is, we built the first purpose-built backup and recovery app for Nutanix … and then we launched purpose-built backup and recovery as a service for Google Cloud. It’s an independent service available from Google Market place.”

Google Cloud SQL is used largely by developers but Taylor said interest in using HYCU for Google goes beyond DevOps. He said Broadcom was HYCU’s first customer for Google backup to protect 4 PB of data.

“A lot of people said ‘Isn’t GCP just for DevOps?’” Taylor said. “But it’s really the large enterprises, it’s these big resellers of GCP buying from us, saying ‘In order for us to go all or even heavily in with Google Cloud, we’ve got to have the kind of backup support that our IT department expects.’”

Price is based on total data under protection and how often it is backed up.

Actifio GO on GCP provides copy data management on GCP by using its Sky technology to move changed data onto GCP. Actifio GO launched in February, 2019, as a SaaS platform that supports AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM and Wasabi public clouds along with GCP. GO is now available through the Google Marketplace.