Veeam Availability Integration for Cisco HyperFlex

Veeam Software AG has expanded its work with Cisco Technology, Inc. by launching the direct snapshot integration with the Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-series

The integration of Veeam Availability Suite with the software-defined networking and computing power of Cisco UCS with the HyperFlex HX Data Platform is designed to deliver simplicity and enhance efficiency in the hybrid cloud era, with the company’s solution enabling enterprises to reduce backup and recovery times and improve overall operational performance.

Veeam Availability Suite

Enabling digital transformation via hybrid cloud
It is increasingly understood that digital transformation is a critical imperative for enterprises worldwide, irrespective of size or vertical market. Organizations that fail to create value, growth and competitive advantage through new digital offerings and business models risk major consequences including long-term business irrelevance. At the heart of this transformation is the hybrid cloud.

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IDC forecasts that public IT cloud services revenue will exceed $203.4 billion by 2020, recording a CAGR of 21.5% – almost seven times the rate of overall IT market growth. ⁽¹⁾ In 2019, public IT cloud services will drive a fifth of the $716 billion aggregate revenue generated by the need for applications, development and deployment tools, infrastructure software, storage, and servers. By 2018, more than half of enterprises’ IT infrastructure and software investments will be cloud based (private and public), reaching 60 to 70% of IT spend by 2020.

Organizations are now reassessing their data centers and embracing a hybrid cloud strategy to meet the challenge of digital transformation. However, maintaining availability across a hybrid cloud environment is not easy. Which is why this news, seeing the company operate deeper on the HyperFlex platform, means businesses can realize not only the increased efficiency and adaptability benefits of HyperFlex and the computing power of UCS, but with the integration of the firm’ solution, ensure data remains available 24x7x365 across a multi-cloud environment.

Achieve advanced availability with firm’ solution and HyperFlex
“Reducing recovery time for data and applications is paramount for businesses, that’s why today’s announcement is so important for the market,” said Peter McKay, president and COO, Veeam. “By combining Veeam’s proven Availability solutions with Cisco’s next-generation HyperFlex platform, we can offer customers unmatched data and application availability. This means a business can realize its investment in IT, without the production downtime that stifles its ability to execute and deliver innovative products and services to customers.“

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This news builds on the collaboration between the company and Cisco, which began in 2013 with joint solutions based on UCS server technology and Availability Suite. Now, as businesses place more critical data and systems online to reap the benefits of digital transformation and utilize data to make better, more informed business decisions, management of that data has become more critical.

“Digital transformaion is driving explosive growth for Cisco HyperFlex,” said Kaustubh Das, VP, product management, storage, Cisco. “Veeam’s data protection solution is now deeply integrated with HyperFlex. This integration helps our customers realize the potential of a next-gen, hyperconverged infrastructure while allowing for rapid business adaptability, minimizing risk, and decreasing downtime for today’s 24.7.365 operations.“

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Key benefits of Veeam direct integration with Cisco HyperFlex include:

• Improved recovery point objectives – Using backups from storage snapshots enables the user to run a backup at any time and any frequency, reducing a business’ exposure to data loss.

• Minimized impact on production – Not using VMware VM snapshots means the high impact of snapshot create and delete operations are eliminated. This reduces the performance impact on production VMs during the copy process.

• Accelerated backups – Potentially improves copy speed up to twice as much compared to the standard vSphere APIs, through the ability to backup data directly from the file system with asynchronous reads when using the company’ Availability Suite 9.5.

• Agentless application aware backup – Across multiple applications, such as Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and Oracle.

• Storage replication – Customers can replicate HyperFlex workloads to another HyperFlex System or to any other vSphere environment including the company’s Cloud and Service Providers by using VM Replication functionality.

Company’s direct integration with HyperFlex will be available globally in 2Q17.

“Enterprises leveraging Cisco Hyperflex got a nice win today with the announcement that Veeam can now do direct snapshots of their infrastructure,” said Dan Thompson, senior analyst, 451 Research. “With this new, tighter integration, backups take place lower in stack, freeing up resources and saving precious time in those ever-shrinking windows. This improvement brings with it the possibility of a shorter RPO , which gives organizations more options within their backup and DR plans.“

“Veeam has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with Cisco, and I am delighted that we are further deepening this relationship with native snapshot integration for Cisco HyperFlex,” said Andy Vandeveld, VP alliances, Veeam. “This is another example of Veeam working tightly with best of breed storage and server vendors to deliver greater performance to ensure data availability. Customers have made it clear they want us to partner with the major storage and server vendors to deliver flexible solutions that work and meet their growing demands for Availability. That’s what we’ve done here. Cisco’s HyperFlex offers a significant differentiation for customers looking to scale storage and compute capacity. Now those same customers can benefit from our new direct integration, which delivers market-leading Availability.“

“Akris is an international fashion brand with store locations worldwide,” said Thomas Kaeser, CIO, Akris, a fashion retailer based in Switzerland. “When we needed a flexible, scalable and secure infrastructure to support our operations we chose, together with our partner Ceruno AG, Cisco HyperFlex and Veeam Availability Suite. Now with deep snapshot integration with HyperFlex, our backups and recoveries will be even faster helping us deliver 24×7 operations.“

“Betta Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd. is undergoing dramatic growth, and the variety of applications used is rapidly increasing. Traditional backup solutions are not scalable and hence are not able to meet the growing needs of the business,” said Chao Wang, manager, IT, Betta Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd., a pharmaceutical firm in China. “Veeam’s integration with Cisco HyperFlex solution is highly flexible, scalable and easy to implement. The Veeam snapshot integration makes backups much faster so there is less impact to the production workloads (VMs) when the backups are taken. It only requires the addition of nodes to increase performance and capacity, reducing TCO which meets the demands of our growing business, and showcases the development trend of industries.“

“Our goal is to help customers take full advantage of technology and our customers are looking to us to provide them guidance as they navigate the digital transformation,” said Costa Diamandis, Uplinx Advanced Services Pty. Ltd., a business partner based in Perth, Australia. “Cisco HyperFlex based on UCS servers and Veeam combine to help us fulfill that promise by offering best in class hyperconverged and availability solutions.“

^[1] Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide, IDC, February 20, 2017.