Nutanix is expanding its disaster recovery services for hybrid cloud IT enterprises. The company improving its offerings, including Nutanix Data Lens, a data management SaaS, and Nutanix Unified Storage, a hybrid cloud storage platform, to incorporate ransomware detection and alert features for increased cyber resilience, particularly for unstructured data.
These developments come as Nutanix aims to compete more comprehensively with VMware, a dominant player in the hybrid cloud market, according to Brent Ellis, an analyst at Forrester Research. Notably, this expansion follows Cisco’s recent exit from the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) market.
“[Nutanix] originally wanted to pitch [Data Lens] more as a data management tool,” Ellis said. “It makes sense they’re looking at these tools and seeing how it applies to ransomware. They’re auditioning to take over a whole bunch of enterprise workloads.”
The new ransomware protection features in Data Lens and Unified Storage employ a signature database with over 5,000 permutations according to Lee Caswell, senior vice president of product and solutions marketing at Nutanix. They can detect potential ransomware infections within files by monitoring signatures and tracking the number of file changes.
Within just 20 minutes, these tools can determine if a ransomware attack is in progress and data management teams. In case of an attack, customers can recover their data using the most recent viable snapshots available on the Nutanix platform.
This move into data protection tools positions Nutanix as a strong hybrid infrastructure competitor to VMware, particularly as VMware. Nutanix is also set to support Cisco’s HyperFlex Data Platform customers as part of a new partnership.