For enterprises driving productivity value, data and the applications that empower your business are where you’ll find the competitive edge. In particular, cloud-based SaaS offerings are key enablers – they’re fast, flexible and indispensable in the modern business environment.
However, supporting an application-centric infrastructure within the confines of a traditional data centre presents a number of challenges. Accessibility, security and compliance of business-critical data makes it challenging to deliver high availability in the enterprise. Cisco predicts that by 2021, 94 percent of workloads and compute instances will instead be processed by cloud data centres.1
Working with customers, we’re seeing these concerns drive a new imperative for the next generation of intelligent infrastructure; simpler, integrated solutions, better equipped to support business-critical applications and data regardless of where they reside – with 24x7x365 availability.
Cisco’s partnership with Veeam – the leader in availability across multi-cloud environments – is the culmination of their respective engineering teams working together to develop a data protection solution that combines two industry-leading offerings into a powerful interconnected ecosystem.
If we take a closer look at their joint solution, these are the top points:
Veeam with Cisco HyperFlex is an all-in-one data protection, data management, and data recovery solution. It’s a turnkey buying and deployment experience with Cisco HyperFlex and Veeam software in a single bundle, all backed with unified support by Cisco.
Maintaining data availability across hybrid cloud, converged or hyper-converged environments has not been easy to achieve. The hyper solution allows the data protection platform to be highly available, provide the ability to scale horizontally for capacity and throughput and protect against node and storage device failures. Veeam with Cisco HyperFlex provides IT departments with a central management and repository for data protection.
With Cisco and Veeam’s combined solution, snapshots are taken direct from storage – outside the production environment – and not from the hypervisor. These space efficient snapshots – taken almost immediately – are then used by Veeam for virtual machine (VM) data processing, which helps speed up backup and replication operations, reduce impact of backup and replication activities on the production environment and improve RPOs.
Eliminating VMware-based snapshots and their associated overheads by integrating directly with underlying storage has typically only been supported with modern storage systems, rather than hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) platforms. Cisco HyperFlex is currently the only HCI platform that Veeam supports this functionality with.
Cisco Hyperflex |
Veeam |
| Complete hyper-convergence Uses a next-generation fabric to unify computing, storage and networking into a single platform. |
Best-in-class data protection Address modern IT recovery, retention, and resiliency. |
| Independent scaling Scale nodes, computing, or capacity independently in clusters as your needs change. |
High-speed recovery Rapid recovery of what you want, the way you want it. |
| Flash-optimised system Gain high performance and storage longevity with a file system built for hyper-convergence. |
Any workload Any app, any data, any cloud including physical/bare metal and multi-cloud. |
| Flexible multi-cloud services Everything you need to deploy virtualised, cloud, and multi-cloud applications. |
Complete visibility Proactive monitoring and alerting of issues before operational impact. |
Source: Veeam (2018), Veeam Availability on Cisco HyperFlex.
It’s clear that together they make good on their promise to deliver across any multi-site, multi-cloud, virtualised or hyper-converged environment. For the enterprise, this means Veeam with Cisco HyperFlex solves the growing challenges of data criticality, growth and sprawl. In particular this unified solution delivers:
Maximising availability across hybrid cloud, converged or hyper-converged environments continues to top the list of concerns for IT professionals2. In fact, 82% of CIOs say there is a gap between what they can deliver and business demands3. There is no doubt availability is critical, but with workloads spread across hybrid IT or combinations of on-premises, public cloud and SaaS environments, data is becoming more distributed, and progressively challenging to manage. This can result in multi-site IT failures due to complex interactions between applications and data.
The ability of Veeam on Cisco HyperFlex to circumvent these technology limitations creates a real availability advantage. This is the first data solution designed to work across the core of the data centre to private and public clouds through to edge locations while allowing recovery to be self-service, easy, and fast – wherever the data is located. Businesses can deploy applications, gain assured performance, manage data autonomously and base it all on their own requirements – essentially extending the data centre to everywhere that data lives and wherever applications are deployed.
In the data-driven enterprise, you can’t afford to have any interruptions to your business-critical applications and the data that powers them. It’s not just about providing a good user experience either – application downtime costs Australian businesses an average of more than $762,000 per incident4.
Veeam on Cisco HyperFlex goes beyond traditional backup and disaster recovery solutions to ensure continuous protection and access for critical data and applications complete with high speed, reliable backup and verified recoverability. And because it’s built on a modern architecture, the overall complexity is reduced as the solutions takes less effort to deploy, run and secure.
Like the solution itself, management is highly unified allowing all the Veeam services, including the repository, to run on Cisco’s hyper-converged infrastructure. This approach means that for customers on the journey to data centre modernisation, it offers an advanced, enterprise-class data availability solution without the complexity – it’s simple to order, deploy and manage and can easily scale as needed.
To support the scale and complexity it takes to manage the sprawl of enterprise data, Veeam with Cisco HyperFlex ticks all the boxes – high availability, reduced risk of downtime or slow performance, and packaged within a simplified, easy-to-use system that supports the agile enterprise like never before.
At Data#3, we’re well positioned to help you transform the data centre with Veeam with Cisco HyperFlex. In addition to being a Cisco Master Partner and Cisco ANZ Partner of the Year, we recently took the top honour as Veeam ProPartner of the Year. This rubber-stamps our capabilities across Veeam product knowledge and support, and shines a light on our growing certifications, accreditations and achievements:
Whether you’re looking to start with a Shadow Data Audit to quickly identify your risky data and cloud applications, or are ready to take the first steps on your modernisation journey, reach out to our expert team today.
1. Cisco. (2018). Cisco Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2016-2021. [Online] Available at: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/global-cloud-index-gci/white-paper-c11-738085.html
2. Datacore Software. (Oct 2018). The State of Software-Defined Storage, Hyperconverged and Cloud Storage (2018).[Online] Available at: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/datacores-the-state-of-software-defined-hyperconverged-and-cloud-storage-market-survey-reveals-that-storage-availability-and-avoiding-vendor-lock-in-remain-top-concerns-for-it-professionals-300736120.html
3. Veeam. (2016). Availability Report: Availability Gap Widens With Application Downtime Costing Enterprises $16 Million Each Year.[Online] Available at: https://www.veeam.com/news/2016-veeam-availability-report.html
4. Stephen Withers iTWire. (Mar 2019). Downtime costs Australian businesses dearly.[Online] Available at: https://www.itwire.com/enterprise-solutions/86343-downtime-costs-australian-businesses-dearly.html
