Veeam Intros First Native Snapshot For Cisco HyperFlex

Veeam is working with Cisco Systems to provide what it calls the first native snapshot capability for Cisco's HyperFlex hyper-converged infrastructure offering.

Veeam, which develops data protection technology for physical, virtualized, and cloud environments, next month plans to release an update to its data protection software that provides direct native snapshots of data on HyperFlex appliances, said Andy Vandeveld, vice president of global alliances for the Baar, Switzerland-based company

"With the integrated solution, there's no need to back up and then do snapshots from vSphere," Vandeveld told CRN. "We can do snaps direct, outside the production virtual machines. It's a more elegant solution to get the snapshots from storage and not from the hypervisor."

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The new solution is targeted at Veeam partners who also work with Cisco UCS and Cisco HyperFlex, Vandeveld said. He was unable to specify how many of Veeam's 35,000 worldwide channel partners also worked with Cisco, but said they number in the thousands.

The new Veeam offering, while designed in conjunction with Cisco's developers, is designed as a meet-in-the-channel solution, which means channel partners do the actual integration of the two companies' products, Vandeveld said.

The Veeam solution for Cisco HyperFlex is important as a new way to bring data from an increasingly common platform into service providers, said Matt Chesterton, CEO of OffsiteDataSync, a Rochester, N.Y.-based service provider with a focus on data protection and Infrastructure-as-a-Service.

The HyperFlex business is growing quickly, Chesterton told CRN. "According to our Salesforce data, we run into HyperFlex quite a bit."

OffsiteDataSync offers off-site data protection from data centers throughout the U.S. and in three other countries in Europe and Asia, and uses Cisco UCS as its back-end technology, Chesterton said.

That Cisco infrastructure makes it important to be able to connect to customers' Cisco solutions including HyperFlex to ensure customer operations and data protection, said Jim Klossner, OffsiteDataSync's chief technology officer.

"Having a single Cisco management solution to scale the infrastructure is important," Klossner told CRN.

Veeam has done a good job of integrating its snapshot technology with other vendors like Nimble Storage as well, which is important, Chesterton said. "Snaps on virtual machines are a deal-breaker in some cases," he said. "Especially in the enterprise where virtual machines can't always be snapshotted."