I’m dusting off my cowboy boots and getting ready to head down to the Lone Star State (Texas) for Cisco’s annual partner summit in a couple weeks. The Cisco Partner Summit is their premier, invite-only partner event held annually for their top partner executives. This year’s theme is “OWN IT,” and as it rapidly approaches, I thought about how Veeam and Cisco is well on their way to OWN IT and enable their customers to do the same, together.
In the technology world, where partnerships are typically “coopetition,” it makes me appreciate how unique the Veeam and Cisco relationship truly is; there are no overlapping competitive technologies. Like the Texas Two-Step, a country western dance that requires partners to work together and be totally in sync, Cisco and Veeam work hand-in-hand to help our customers innovate and modernize their data centers. Cisco delivers the perfect platform for running Veeam’s industry-leading Availability solutions in the UCS series of storage servers that combine high performance, ease of use and reliability.
One-stop shopping
The big news is that Veeam has been chosen as one of a select group of ISVs to participate in Cisco’s SolutionsPlus program, which will make Veeam available in the Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW), which is the quoting and configuration tool that Cisco and their partners use. Cisco SolutionsPlus delivers a one-stop ordering experience that means resellers building solutions with Cisco UCS and Veeam can quote and purchase the two together. For customers, that means they can have the confidence that these configurations are pre-validated and sized for workloads, significantly reducing risk with the deployment. But that’s not all!
More Boot Scootin’ — unique integration with Cisco HyperFlex
Veeam can also be quoted and configured with Cisco HyperFlex, their next generation hyper-converged infrastructure that is getting accolades across the industry. Earlier this year, I wrote about Cisco adding Flash to HyperFlex, which to me, signaled that HyperFlex was ready for any application or workload in the data center. Now the best part, Veeam has unique integration with HyperFlex’s native snapshots, providing faster backups without impacting performance on the production systems, thus lowering RPOs — it’s another example of Veeam and Cisco doing the perfect Texas Two-Step. Another win-win for customers, HyperFlex is ready for any workload, and Veeam delivers the lowest possible RPOs providing Availability for the Always-On Enterprise.
Performance, manageability and reliability
The Veeam and Cisco partnership has been steadily maturing and going deeper. Beyond being in CCW and the native integration with Cisco HyperFlex, Veeam and Cisco have worked on a variety of reference architectures and Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs). In the last year, Cisco has added a CVD for Veeam and HyperFlex design, another one for implementation and soon there will be a new one for distributed environments and remote office, branch office environments.
Also coming soon, Veeam will be part of Cisco dCloud, which provides an online way to offer demos, training and sandboxes for Cisco architectures. This means partners will be able to easily show the way Veeam integrates with HyperFlex and sizzles with Cisco UCS.
It is truly a testament of Cisco and Veeam working together to bring best-of-breed solutions to our joint customers. And customers agree too. In a recent ESG paper surveying our joint customers, the traits most often sighted for choosing Cisco and Veeam were performance, manageability and reliability.
Are you a customer or partner benefiting from Cisco and Veeam’s close collaboration? Share your experience in the comments section.
