Veritas Technologies and Nutanix announced an important next step in their global technology partnership. The partnership will help joint customers benefit from greater protection for all virtualized workloads running on Nutanix, as well as the ability to move applications across clouds, while remaining open to any hardware, hypervisor or cloud.

As part of the partnership, Veritas NetBackup 8.1, the company's flagship data protection solution, is now certified to protect workloads virtualized on AHV, Nutanix's native hypervisor. Through NetBackup 8.1, joint customers will also will be able to optimize and protect the movement of data and workloads faster within the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud or to other public, private or hybrid cloud environments.

The collaboration is designed to address two key challenges joint customers face today: First, how to spend less time worrying about data centre infrastructure and more time on the applications and services that power business. Second, the partnership helps to ensure critical data and workloads running on Nutanix are further protected with a single, unified solution that is the foundation for end-to-end 360 data management.

The extended partnership between Veritas and Nutanix provides joint customers with the following benefits:

• Faster backup and recovery of Nutanix virtual workloads, combined with powerful deduplication technology with Veritas NetBackup CloudCatalyst, enabling customers to take greater advantage of the public cloud, while saving money for storing Nutanix backups.

• Greater business continuity with Nutanix's built-in infrastructure resiliency that is further enhanced by Veritas NetBackup that provides rapid recovery of business-critical applications and data.

• The ability to confidently and rapidly deploy next-generation, scale-out, multi-petabyte, hyperconverged workloads with NetBackup Parallel Streaming, a technology powered by a patented plug-in architecture that delivers high performance and reliability.

• Simplified data protection and recovery through the integration of Veritas CloudPoint with AHV, Nutanix's native hypervisor for managing snapshot operations. With a simple interface, users can take a snapshot of data and modern applications on a virtual machine and its attached disks, restore a snapshot to the original virtual machine, or delete a snapshot across private, public or hybrid clouds.

Additionally, as a result of the enhanced partnership, there are new opportunities for joint go-to-market and support initiatives from both companies, designed to help customers accelerate their adoption of next-generation cloud approaches for a wide spectrum of workloads by leveraging the combined enterprise expertise of Veritas and Nutanix.

The partnership between the two giants is setting the gold standard for cloud-driven innovation. Both Nutanix and Veritas are leaders in their respective categories. While Nutanix is a Leader in Gartner's 2016 Magic Quadrant for Integrated Systems, Veritas Technologies is a Leader in Gartner's 2017 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions.

Along with Veritas has previously provided data protection for Nutanix, the expanded partnership will also enable channel partners to customize solutions for mutual customers that require data protection capabilities when adding critical hyperconverged workloads, migrating data or merging infrastructure on-premises or in multi-clouds. It also offers the channel new business opportunities for consulting and professional services.

"Organizations today need a data management strategy for data spread across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments that require a proven, high-performance backup and recovery technology designed to accommodate the most demanding workloads," said Rama Kolappan, vice president, Product Management and Alliances, Veritas. "With the combined power of Nutanix and Veritas that blends a leader in hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and Enterprise Cloud with the premier backup and recovery solution on the planet, customers can now protect a vast array of enterprise workloads."

"Today's organizations must plan for a hybrid IT environment with users requiring more versatile solutions that are open to any hardware, hypervisor or cloud," said Venugopal Pai, vice president of Strategic Alliances and Business Development, Nutanix. "Our expanded partnership with Veritas will help joint customers meet this need, providing holistic data protection and management for critical enterprise workloads across multi-cloud environments."