5 Things To Know About Cisco And Veeam's Hyper-Converged Solution

Cisco HyperFlex With Veeam

Partners selling Cisco HyperFlex are getting a serious data management boost with the new integration of Veeam's High Availability solution, which channel partners from both vendors will be able to leverage to attack the hyper-converged infrastructure market.

"It's going to be a game-changer for the industry," said Peter McKay (pictured), co-CEO and president of Veeam, in an interview with CRN at VMworld 2018.

The San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant selected Veeam as its first and only intelligent data management technology partner to increase the capabilities on Cisco HyperFlex aimed at simplifying customer's hyper-converged deployments and reducing the resources needed to manage it. Here are five things you need to know about the new Cisco HyperFlex:

Veeam High Availability

Launched in May, Veeam High Availability is a highly resilient data management platform that provides seamless scalability, ease of management and support for multi-cloud environments that supports all virtual, physical and cloud workloads. To support the scale and complexity it takes to manage the hyper-sprawl of enterprises data today, Cisco HyperFlex integrated with Veeam High Availability to help customers move from traditional, policy-based data management to a more behavior-based system. The new HyperFlex with Veeam enables partners and customers to manage data more autonomously and deliver business and operational insights at speed.

New Channel Incentives Ahead

Veeam High Availability on Cisco HyperFlex will become generally available for the channel to sell during the fourth quarter of 2018. The solution will be offered through a single, pre-validated Cisco SKU that includes all installed software and hardware.

"It's a tightly integrated solution [and we're] going to market together as a joint, single SKU, that all the Cisco sales organizations, Cisco channel, Veeam channel can take advantage of," said McKay, in a video interview with CRN.

McKay said Veeam will be launching new programs in the coming months specifically around HyperFlex to incent the channel to drive sales and services. "We're going to introduce some interesting and exciting new programs to incentivize the channel to really grab it and run with this new offering," he said.

Scales Up To 200 TB

The initial HyperFlex with Veeam High Availability integration will scale to around 200 TB of usable data, although more models will be launched in the future, according to Siva Sivakumar, senior director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco. Veeam and Cisco have formed several technology partnerships over the years, with Veeam already providing backup for HyperFlex workloads such as snapshot integration.

"Veeam already worked with HyperFlex," said Sivakumar, in a media briefing. "Now Veeam works on HyperFlex."

Partner Take

Raphael Meyerowitz, vice president, office of the CTO at New York City-based Presidio, a top Cisco and Veeam partner, said it was "very exciting" to see the two companies deepening their partnership.

"As easy as the Veeam software is to implement for SMBs, larger organizations need additional architecture and deployment services as well as scalability-planning following the initial deployment," said Meyerowitz. "By further simplifying the deployment processes for providing hyper-availability, we'll be able to focus more of our expertise and service delivery on the strategic capabilities enabled through the Veeam software, which will of course also be running on Cisco hardware."

Hyper-Converged 'Game-Changer'

In a video interview with CRN, Veeam's co-CEO McKay said the new capabilities added to HyperFlex will "be a game-changer" in the hyper-converged infrastructure market in terms of competition.

"The focus for us was really around, 'How do we make it easier for [customers] to buy. Easier for them to deploy. Easier for them to manage a combined solution. That's what we really focused on, easier for the customers to manage and run a data management solution," said McKay. "We think this is a win for our customers. A win for our partners and a win for Cisco and Veeam."