Nutanix has released several new capabilities within its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software and AHV hypervisor this week.

The new capabilities bring automation support for application and data recovery, support for multi-site disaster recovery, synchronous replication for workloads on Nutanix AHV, and “near sync” replication for recovery point objective (RPO) times of approximately 20 seconds.

The new capabilities are designed to support business continuity and strong recovery policies.

Nutanix states customers looking to implement strong DR plans for critical applications, such as those supporting emergency services, had little choice but to deploy complex, often disparate technologies that demand specialised, on-going administration.

The company believes that the HCI and AHV capabilities can help to solve those issues by delivering mission-critical applications with significantly less complexity and lower management overhead.

“Maintaining continuous business operations is a high priority for all types of companies and organisations,” says Nutanix VP of product marketing, Greg Smith.

“However, most businesses rely on custom, handcrafted DR implementations to guard against system-wide IT failures. Nutanix now natively delivers automated, easy-to-deploy disaster recovery solutions built to deliver applications that must always be available.

• Multi-site disaster recovery: Nutanix now supports multi-site DR designs, helping enable enterprises to quickly recover from the simultaneous failure of two or more data centers while keeping applications and data available to users. 
  
  Nutanix states that this could be particularly valuable in regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, and emergency services where organisations need to deliver uninterrupted service. Nutanix DR leverages advanced automation technology to eliminate the complexity of DR installation and ongoing orchestration. Application teams can quickly recover from unplanned outages or data corruption and set configurations to adhere to many stringent compliance requirements.
   
• Near sync disaster recovery: Nutanix now supports near sync replication with an RPO of only about 20 seconds, a 3x improvement boost compared to other Nutanix technology. 
   
• Synchronous data replication for Nutanix AHV: Synchronous replication, or the nearly instantaneous replication of data between multiple locations, is now natively supported on the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. AHV can be used by customers to deliver a highly available service for their most important workloads, such as virtual desktop infrastructure, databases, and general server virtualisation.
   
• DR Orchestration with runbooks: The latest release gives customers more flexibility and control over the end-to-end recovery process, with more granular control to focus DR resources toward targeted applications. 

The new DR capabilities are included in the Nutanix HCI software and are generally available.