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 outlining the C Class series platform and how Veeam can really benefit from some of these great features.
Cisco & Veeam Appliance – A Match made in… – http://bit.ly/1jrb6fD
The compelling use case that I am seeing on a daily basis is simply some people for compliance, security or whatever reason cannot move to those giant fluffy public clouds in the sky. It might even come down to cost, and this platform is a said to be extremely efficient and cost effective to achieve a small price point than some of the public cloud storage offerings.
This is fine, because for a while yet there is going to be a need and a strong use case for the “traditional” infrastructure and to boot the price points seem to be falling for this hardware compared to public cloud costs. However I digress. The reason for this post is to outline the new features or the great capabilities that have been brought to the Cisco S3260 Storage Server.
Announced yesterday at the Cisco Partner Summit, this would be the first in the S range, this will provide an element of storage to the enterprise end users as well as those managed cloud service providers.
The long awaited addition to this Storage Server in the previous life as the C3260, was one thing that was strangely missing. Today this gap is filled and what a huge gap it is. This really joins up the Converged message that Cisco have been championing in their Converged Infrastructure offerings with various other storage vendors. The ability to connect this storage server to the already in-place Fabric Interconnect, not only meaning a central management layer with UCS Manager but now to be able truly achieve unified I/O connectivity in the same converged platform.On top of that though it doesn’t mean that only the converged platforms win, not at all, what this also means is that new fabric interconnects can be leveraged to allow multiple S3260 servers to be linked together to give a huge capacity offering.
“Each 4U chassis can be linked to a Cisco fabric interconnect, so as many as 26 of the S3260 servers can be linked together for a total capacity of just over 15PB.”
Let me bring this back to why Veeam and Cisco think this is a great “Appliance” for the Veeam Availability message, it really comes down to the high density of being able to fit 60 disks in 4U at a combined total of 600TB with the added bonus of being able to centrally manage this now using Cisco UCS Manager, but also being able to use this fast storage which is essential for the Veeam Instant VM Recovery function to really benefit.
Another final point to mention is this “Appliance” model really fits the amazing new file system from Microsoft which also offers great benefits for Veeam backups find out more here – https://www.veeam.com/blog/advanced-refs-integration-coming-veeam-availability-suite.html
