Cisco HyperFlex bundles Veeam data protection

LAS VEGAS — Unlike many of its data protection software rivals, Veeam Software has resisted putting its applications on a branded integrated appliance. Instead, it partners with large and small backup target vendors to compete with integrated appliances from the likes of Veritas, Dell EMC, Commvault, Cohesity and Rubrik.

Today, Veeam landed a partnership with Cisco to bundle Veeam High Availability on Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) appliances. Cisco represents a large reseller channel for Veeam, although HyperFlex is far from a market leader in the HCI market.

Peter McKay

Disclosing the deal today at VMworld, Veeam CEO Peter McKay said the Veeam-HyperFlex partnership has been a year in the making. He called it “step one in a journey,” and the relationship will expand. It will begin with a single SKU that Cisco will begin selling around October. Cisco will also handle support for the system.

Siva Sivakumar, senior director of data center solutions for Cisco, said the first HyperFlex appliance with Veeam will scale to around 200 TB of usable data but more models will follow. Veeam software is already available to protect data stored on Cisco HyperFlex but Sivakumar said the vendors tuned the software to optimize it for HyperFlex.

“Veeam already worked with HyperFlex,” he said. “Now Veeam works on HyperFlex.”

Having Cisco as a partner could help Veeam in its quest to move deeper into the enterprise. Veeam already partners with Cisco HCI rival Nutanix, and last month added the ability to protect data on the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. Veeam added a partnership with software-defined storage startup Hedvig in July. Veeam also has partnerships of varying degrees with NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell EMC.

Cisco works with other data protection vendors, and has an OEM deal with Commvault to sell Commvault’s HyperScale software on Cisco UCS servers, rebranded as ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS. UCS is also the hardware platform for Cisco HyperFlex.

“One thing we do well is work with many partners, and we make it work well for both,” Sivakumar said. “Veeam goes after highly virtualized customers, while Commvault goes after both bare metal and virtualized customers and legacy migrations.”