Nutanix added capabilities to its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software that automates disaster recovery.

It now supports multi-site disaster recovery designs, which use automation to help enterprises more quickly recover from the simultaneous failure of two or more data centers while keeping applications and data available to users. This capability is especially important in regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, and emergency services.

Nutanix also added near-sync replication with a recovery point objective (RPO) of only about 20 seconds. RPO measures the time between the last data backup and a potential disaster, thus determining the maximum amount of data that may be lost without hurting business. Nutanix claims this is a 300% improvement from its earlier HCI technology, and says it is the only HCI vendor to offer a 20-second RPO.

Additionally, the Nutanix AHV hypervisor now natively supports synchronous replication, or the nearly instantaneous replication of data between multiple locations. This also ensures highly available service for important workloads like virtual desktop infrastructure, databases, and general server virtualization.

And finally, the latest HCI release includes disaster recovery orchestration with runbooks, allow allowing users to focus disaster recovery resources at targeted applications.

The HCI software update drops a week before Nutanix will report its third-quarter fiscal 2020 earnings. After a bright start to fiscal 2020, which sent Nutanix stock skyrocketing more than 21% as investors responded to the vendor’s successful transition to a software subscription-based business model, Nutanix shares fell back to earth after its Q2 earnings. On the company’s earnings call in February, CEO Dheeraj Pandey warned that the coronavirus may hurt Nutanix’s business for the rest of 2020.

And earlier this month Nutanix began rolling furloughs that will hit more than a quarter of its global workforce as it attempts to weather the COVID-19 economy. This includes almost 1,500 San Francisco Bay area employees, according to a notice filed with the California Employment Development Department. These employees will take two, one-week long unpaid furloughs over the next six months.

“We have carefully scripted these furloughs to minimize the impact on our customers, with all Nutanix services fully available during this time,” a spokesperson told SDxCentral. “Our philosophy as we navigate the COVID-19 pandemic is to do the ‘most good’ with the least amount of harm for all of our employees and these furloughs will help us achieve that.”