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Unique direct snapshot integration with Cisco HyperFlex enables Veeam and Cisco to deliver the most advanced Availability requirements enterprises need to forge ahead with their Digital Transformation plans in today’s multi-cloud world

Baar, Switzerland: March 2, 2017 Veeam® Software, the innovative provider of solutions that deliver Availability for the Always-On Enterprise™, has expanded its work with Cisco by launching the direct snapshot integration with the Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform. The integration of Veeam Availability SuiteTM with the software-defined networking and computing power of Cisco UCS with the Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform is designed to deliver simplicity and enhance efficiency in the modern hybrid cloud era, with Veeam enabling enterprises to reduce backup and recovery times and improve overall operational performance.

Enabling Digital Transformation via the 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.

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 percent — almost seven times the rate of overall IT market growth.[i] 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 percent 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 today’s news, seeing Veeam operate deeper on the Cisco HyperFlex platform, means businesses can realize not only the increased efficiency and adaptability benefits of Cisco HyperFlex and the computing power of Cisco UCS, but with the integration of Veeam, ensure data remains available 24.7.365 across a multi-cloud environment.

Achieve Advanced Availability with Veeam and Cisco 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 Chief Operating Officer, 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.”

Today’s news builds on a successful collaboration between Veeam and Cisco, which began in 2013 with joint solutions based on Cisco UCS server technology and Veeam 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 transformation is driving explosive growth for Cisco HyperFlex,” said Kaustubh Das, Cisco VP, Product Management, Storage. “Veeam’s data protection solution is now deeply integrated with HyperFlex. This integration helps our customers realize the full 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.”

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 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.

Supporting Quotes

“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 (recovery point objective), which gives organizations more options within their backup and disaster recovery 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 of Alliances at 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 leading 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 24x7 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, IT Manager at Betta Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd., a high-tech 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 total cost of ownership (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, a business partner based in Perth, Australia. “Cisco HyperFlex based on UCS servers and Veeam combine to help us fulfil that promise by offering best in class hyperconverged and availability solutions.”