The new integration extends ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS to Cisco’s HyperFlex hyperconverged products, and validates Commvault’s IntelliSnap snapshot technology with them.
Wenceslao Lada, Vice President, Worldwide Alliances, at Commvault
Data protection vendor Commvault has announced the further extension of its strategic partnership with Cisco around Cisco’s HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure [HCI] systems. The new relationship validates extends Commvault’s ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS to HyperFlex IntelliSnap snapshot technology as having been fully tested to work with the hyperconverged offerings.
Cisco is a long-time Commvault strategic partner, although they elevated the relationship to a new level in late 2017, making Cisco an actual reseller of Commvault for the first time with Commvault solutions specific to Cisco going on Cisco’s price list. Shortly afterward, Commvault launched HyperScale, a data infrastructure offering they considered to be highly disruptive, and ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS, the first solution which used the HyperScale software reference architecture. The new agreement with Cisco expands ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS to the Cisco HyperFlex platform to provide it with a dedicated enterprise backup and recovery capability.
“This is our first integration with HyperFlex,” said Wenceslao Lada, Vice President, Worldwide Alliances, at Commvault. “This is a major announcement for both companies. It deepens the relationship which started with the implementation of ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS. Extending it to HyperFlex means that what we are bringing to market now provides a much more complete approach to customers for the handling of complex workloads. It will provide better scale and more flexibility in how they deploy different workloads.”
“We are excited about the opportunity that this presents with Cisco’s partner ecosystem,” said Carmen Sorice, Commvault’s Vice President of Worldwide Partner Success, who supports Commvault’s Partner Business Managers with the resources around enablement, demand generation and partner programs that they need to be successful. “This will give partners the ability to offer more protection to their Cisco customers, and thus add more value.”
Lada indicated that the companies are working on the specifics of the go-to-market motion for this.
“We are working on how to bring this to market in a very aggressive way, and are discussing this with partners and customers,” he said. “With Cisco, we have identified the type of customers we would like to address together with this. From a competitive standpoint, we see the very strong partnership with Cisco as providing strong opportunities for our channel partners, and presenting a strongly competitive solution for them.”
Cisco also partners strongly with Veeam around HyperFlex, but Lada indicated that he sees Cisco’s two partnerships here as fundamentally different, and that Veeam isn’t really a competitor in the kind of HyperFlex opportunities that Commvault pursues.
“I think that it’s two different things,” he said. “We are much more enterprise-oriented. Customers in the enterprise are looking more and more at how they can scale their data centres, and with our scale and performance, we can bridge the entire solution for them.”
