In recent years, On-Demand Labs have become an important part in our IT industry to train employees but also to run customer demos and get hands-on experience. One of the most innovative and capable On-Demand Labs is Cisco’s dCloud. Cisco dCloud is a huge catalog of demos, trainings and sandboxes for every Cisco architecture that are fully scripted. The customizable environments are available almost instantly in the cloud. It’s very easy to work with and to get started all you need is a Cisco account. That’s why I’m more than happy to let you know that as of mid-November we provide you a with fullRead More →

In this busy world of HyperConverged and Converged Infrastructure offerings. Last week NetApp released a new beast. The FlexPod SF, and it’s exactly that. A converged offering from Cisco and NetApp with SolidFire storage capability running alongside Cisco networking and compute in a validated and reference architecture. A cool marketing video if anything – The FlexPod Portfolio As I said FlexPod isn’t new from both Cisco & NetApp they have been doing it for years. Before I joined Veeam this was my bread and butter from a design and implementation point of view. Introducing FlexPod SF It is suggested that the FlexPod SF use caseRead More →

Sitting here at 38,000ft on the way over to my first Cisco Live US frantically preparing slide decks for sessions and webinars I have fast approaching. (That bit is done at this point don’t worry boss) I wanted to touch base and give an overview of all the super cool stuff that Veeam does with Cisco. Cisco HyperFlex Veeam over the short lifetime of HyperFlex (just over a year) have really jumped on board this hyperconverged offering from Cisco. A lot of joint roadshows in the beginning on how Veeam can keep data Available by backing up but also replicating across sites. More recently theRead More →

  Back in March 2016, fast approaching the 1 year ago mark, Cisco announced their journey into the HyperConverged space with HyperFlex, a solution leveraging the software defined storage technology from SpringPath. I wrote about this announcement back then here – http://bit.ly/1ngMmb6 Some of the key figures announced today were that over 70PB of storage has been sold as part of this solution and there around 950 new customers enrolled to the HyperFlex offerings. As I covered in my launch post regarding HyperFlex, the differentiators being around the Integrated Network Fabric  for that one stop shop for Compute, Storage and also Networking. The ability to integrateRead More →

  Back in September 2015 I wrote a specific blog post around leveraging the Cisco C class range as an amazing scalable backup repository and management server for Veeam.  In particular it was at this time that the Cisco C3260 was released. Yesterday the S3260 was announced (1st November), and whilst everything is still true in the S3260 and what I said regarding the C3260 in my post there is a little more. I wanted to share the additional features that make this an even more great reason to consider these as an awesome Veeam Backup Appliance. For reference here is my original post outliningRead More →

Last week I had the pleasure of attending NetApp Insight in Berlin, having been to this conference in this same city for the past 3 years and also once for a Cisco Live, I knew the lay of the land and my bearings. This however was the third Insight in Berlin and my third different role. This time I was over for the Technical Evangelist role. This gave a different steer to the attendance. I was able to attend a lot of good technical sessions some of which I plan to shake down in another post this week. It was also my debut session speakingRead More →

The unveiling of Cisco HyperFlex Systems On the 1st March 2016 Cisco will announce a new HyperConverged solution based on their existing UCS C & B Class compute, existing UCS Fabric Interconnects and a new Software Defined Storage approach that allows Cisco to offer that “Complete Solution” inclusive of Compute, Storage and networking where as other HyperConverged are missing that element that Cisco do really well, Networking! “True Hyper-convergence” Before I dive into the deep information regarding this new range from Cisco I want to touch on the current state of Hyper-convergence, a caveat from myself here is that I for one do not doRead More →

There have been some recent posts and articles around Veeam and the Cisco UCS 3160 being a great fit together, with the availability features offered within Veeam’s Availability Suite and with the Cisco UCS 3160 high density storage and compute capabilities. When I say great fit the UCS 3160 offers compute function where Windows 2012R2 can be installed and can be used as a Veeam Backup & Replication server as well as a proxy, along with the high capacity direct attached storage it offers for a potential large backup repository. Whether the end user is looking to integrate into their existing Cisco UCS environment orRead More →

This post takes a high-level look at the FlexPod solutions NetApp offers today and provides the basic fundamentals:  what comprises a FlexPod, the unique benefits FlexPod delivers, how to identify a FlexPod opportunity, standard configurations, etc. If you’re new to FlexPod, this should get you off to a great start. FlexPod Architecture What is FlexPod? Shared infrastructure for a wide range of environments and applications. •       Validated, standardised, shared infrastructure •       Flexibility and scalability within a single rack •       Centralised management of pooled resources •       Deployment guides with step-by-step instructions •       Solution guides pre-define multiple workloads •       Multiple sizing tools Minimum requirements for a “FlexPod”Read More →