Veeam and Cisco’s recent collaboration sees Veeam’s backup solution able to read data directly from Cisco’s HyperFlex virtual machine shapshot. Veeam’s Technical Director for APJ, Raymond Goh said, “The unique combination of direct access to Cisco’s HyperFlex while still being able to leverage VMware’s CBT, makes Veeam integration with Cisco a key differentiator in the market.”
What this integration brings together in essence is Veeam’s hypervisor-based solutions to enable an always on business and operations and Cisco’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) or Unified Computing System.
Veeam and Cisco claim that the combination of the two solutions can help enterprises reduce backup and recovery times, as well as improve overall operational performance.
The focus of integration
According to Goh, there is no unique requirement needed to backup a HCI system. The same does not hold true for legacy boxes, however.
Goh said, “Basically, hypervisor-based backup is dependent on the hypervisor snapshot. This means that as long as, hypervisor is able to snapshot the VMs, the backup will have no issue and it will be hardware transparent.
“Importantly, to be able to scale-up the backup efficiency of HCI from a basic level, that will depend on the advanced integration of the backup software with the HCI systems, which is exactly the key focus of Veeam and Cisco Hyperflex integration.”
Besides being able to read data directly from Cisco’s VM snapshot, Veeam can leverage VMware’s Changed Block Tracking (CBT).
This feature ensures that incremental backups are maintained.
Benefits
This integration yields three main benefits for organisations namely it minimises performance impact on production VMs during backup, backs up VMs as often as you need without constraint of a backup window, and it does all this while achieving RPO of 15 minutes or less.
Ultimately, this improves return of investment, because of the higher utilisation and optimisation of the HCI systems together with Veeam. And businesses can sleep better because of minimal data loss and business availability that is truly 24 hours x 7 days throughout the whole year.
