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 →

The reason for this post is to tie in with the last post but give you a step by step guide on how to create the “FlexClone On Steroids” Create backup / Snapshot only job The following steps are required for that scheduled snapshot job that can be ran during business hours this is not a requirement for this however I have found it quite useful in having a scheduled point in time snapshot to then go and create a FlexClone from. Create Application Group The creation of the Application Group only has to be done once and this is really there to determine theRead More →

Introduction About a month ago I started a series of posts around Veeam Appliances, the first post alluded to the Cisco C Class 240/3160 & 3260 and this being used as a Direct Attached Storage model for Backup, combined with the compute power this made for a very good scalable solution for what and where to take your backups – you can find that post here. Next up I hit on the NetApp E-Series a SAN array and how this could benefit customers if used in conjunction with Veeam as a backup repository, leveraging an investment in a SAN fabric or network and making fullRead More →

What is FastSCP ? FastSCP is the simplest and fastest way to deliver ISO files to ESX Servers or copy VMs and templates between ESX Servers. FastSCP ensures security by using a one-time password feature and works more than six times faster than SCP. What is Microsoft Azure ? Microsoft Azure (formerly Windows Azure before 25 March 2014) is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure, created by Microsoft, for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. The Problem There are many problems or issues currently associated with how we can bring back data from the public cloud andRead More →

I have been asked by a number of people since joining Veeam about the NetApp Storage Snapshot Support in version 8 of the software. This is the reason for this post to try and outline the Why and the How use cases for the Veeam & NetApp Storage integration. Firstly I want to go over the process of Veeam and any non storage snapshot enabled array (not supported with Veeam today) Veeam uses the VMware snapshot technology, when taking a backup we need to ensure that everything is consistent this is either done by using Veeam Application Aware Image Processing which will talk to theRead 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 →