In an expansion of the relationship Veeam has shared with Cisco since 2013, the company has introduced a unique direct native snapshot integration with the Cisco HyperFlex 2.0 platform as part of the Veeam Availability 9.5. The solution has been designed to deliver simplicity and enhance efficiency in the modern hybrid cloud era, enabling enterprises to reduce backup and recovery times and improve overall operational performance.
This new Cisco HyperFlex release extends the Availability of the Cisco Data Center portfolio with Veeam. The use case for the Cisco HyperFlex offering is broad, covering main data centre workloads, as well as remote and branch office locations. Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 2 will bring more efficient Availability to Cisco HyperFlex 2.0 by providing both an optimised backup and replication workflow to lower the recovery time and point objectives (RTPO) to less than 15 minutes for all applications and data running on top of it.
With the integrated solution, there’s no need to back up and then do snapshots from the hypervisor, but rather from the storage arrays. Veeam has long supported snapshots for storage arrays, and integrates with arrays from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NetApp, Nimble Storage and Dell EMC’s VNXe. The Cisco HyperFlex integration is unique since it is the first hyper-converged system to integrate with Veeam’s data protection. The level of integration with the Hyperflex platform exceeds that which has been achieved so far with Veeam’s other storage integrations.
Gregg Petersen, Regional Director, Middle East, Africa and SAARC at Veeam said, “The new solution is targeted at thousands of Veeam partners, who also work with Cisco UCS and Cisco HyperFlex, and offers them the opportunity to do the actual integration of the two companies’ products. The deep relationship around Hyperflex gives joint Veeam and Cisco partners the ability to put together broader solutions. From the point of view of the end-user, the solution delivers the most advanced Availability requirements enterprises need to forge ahead with their digital transformation plans in today’s multi-cloud world.”
It is increasingly understood that digital transformation is a critical imperative for enterprises worldwide, irrespective of size or vertical market. Organisations 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.
IDC forecasts that public IT cloud services revenue will exceed $203.4 billion by 2020, recording a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.5 per cent, almost seven times the rate of overall IT market growth. 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 per cent of IT spend by 2020.
Key benefits of Veeam’s 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 at any frequency, reducing 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 dramatically 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 VMware vSphere APIs, through the unique ability to backup data directly from the file system with asynchronous reads when using Veeam 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 now replicate Cisco HyperFlex workloads to another HyperFlex System or to any other VMware vSphere environment including Veeam Cloud & Service Providers by using Veeam’s VM Replication functionality.
Veeam’s direct integration with Cisco HyperFlex will be available globally in Q2 CY2017.
For more information, visit www.veeam.com.