written by Anne Schulze
“When disaster strikes, small businesses often find themselves at a crossroads, struggling to recover without breaking the bank,” says Manjul Sahay, ex Senior Director of Product Management at Nutanix. This insight led Sahay to develop a disaster recovery service that simplifies the process and reduces costs, making it accessible to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This narrative explores Sahay’s journey and the impact of their work on the software industry, particularly in the area of storage cloud services.
Challenge of Disaster Recovery for SMEs
Disaster recovery is important for all companies and organizations to protect their systems against natural disasters, software issues, and the increasingly common ransomware attacks. Application downtime or lost data leads to loss of customer confidence, direct loss of revenue and can severely damage the brand image.
Often these situations may also lead to legal action and severely impact the overall health of the organization. Despite its importance, more than 35% of organizations reported that they did not conduct disaster recovery tests in the last 12 months. That is why improving disaster recovery, business continuity preparation, and recovering from cyberattacks is a top goal for information technology (IT) leaders. What makes implementation of a disaster recovery solution difficult? For SMEs, the difficulty is in implementing a complex solution involving two sites. The holy grail of disaster recovery for SMEs is a simple and easy solution. Anything complex does not work for SME customers.
A New Cloud Service Approach to Disaster Recovery
At Nutanix, Sahay led product management for “Xi Leap”, a new hybrid cloud disaster recovery service, which aimed to change how organisations approach business continuity. Sahay’s vision was to make robust disaster recovery capabilities more accessible by taking advantage of new emerging cloud technology. Sahay led his team to develop new technology innovations to make Xi Leap really easy for customers.
Many of these innovations have also been patented, such as an innovative way to manage resources across the on premise and cloud environment. Sahay is a co-inventor on three of these patents which have also been cited by many other companies in their related patents. These innovations resulted in Xi Leap offering a seamless, one-click failover from on-premises to the cloud, making disaster recovery more accessible and affordable. Xi Leap offered recovery of data up to 5 minutes old and recovery from disasters within 60 minutes. Xi Leap also offered multi-site VPN and Direct Connect networking options to connect customer sites and the cloud based disaster recovery site. All of this was available through an easy onboarding portal. Sahay and Nutanix team also obtained multiple certifications for Xi Leap including ISO 27001 to indicate maturity and security of this new cloud service.
“With Xi Leap, we aimed to make disaster recovery capabilities more accessible,” reflects Sahay. “We sought to make it possible for businesses of various sizes to protect their critical workloads with simplicity and cost-effectiveness by eliminating the need for dedicated disaster recovery data centers.”
Sahay also focused on spreading this message of hybrid cloud disaster recovery service with customers. Sahay spoke at various IT conferences, conducted webinars with industry analysts and worked with the Nutanix team to celebrate customer successes.
This outlook has strongly resonated with thousands of SME customers who have adopted Xi Leap. One successful and happy customer has been Alabama A&M (Agricultural and Mechanical) University based in Huntsville. It is part of northern Alabama which is particularly prone to tornadoes. To deal with these threats, Alabama A&M CIO Damian Clarke overhauled the university’s IT infrastructure around Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure and its Xi Leap DR as a service (DRaaS). Xi Leap would allow the schools to operate remotely if campuses or other facilities were not available. When COVID-19 hit unexpectedly, Alabama A&M were able to move online in a matter of days from a technology perspective using Nutanix and Xi Leap DRaaS service. This was a great success for the school and showed the significant advantage from adoption of Nutanix and Xi Leap DRaaS. Many other SMEs from diverse industries have reported similar success adopting Xi Leap including San Joaquin General Hospital, City of Berkeley and legal services provider Lexipol.
A Thoughtful Conclusion
Sahay’s career spans companies like Amazon Web Services, VMware and Nutanix, where he has focused on developing innovative cloud services that address the changing IT landscape. Sahay’s journey in the software industry, particularly in storage cloud services, highlights the importance of invention and foresight. His contributions have simplified complex processes and made advanced technologies accessible to a broader range of businesses. As Sahay continues to develop solutions that address the evolving needs of the industry, his impact is likely to grow.
Reflecting on his work, Sahay notes, “Innovation is about more than just creating new products; it’s about understanding the challenges businesses face and developing solutions that make a real difference. We can drive meaningful change in the industry by focusing on the needs of our customers.”
