The new SwiftStack Software Appliance has a added a 1click Application Profile for Veeam to simplify object storage for Veeam Cloud Tier. It is the second such Application Profile for SwifStack, following another one with Splunk announced earlier this month.

MIAMI — Multi-cloud data storage and management vendor Swiftstack has announced that their new SwiftStack Software Appliance has added a 1click Application Profile for Veeam. It is specifically designed to further simplify setup and management of cloud or on-premises object storage for Cloud Tier, a new feature in Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4. It is the second Application Profile to become available, following the announcement of one for Splunk three weeks ago.

The SwiftStack Software Appliance is designed to automate the installation, configuration, and maintenance of all software components on the storage nodes housing the application data sets. With Veeam, SwiftStack has also met Veeam Ready Object status in Veeam’s newest category for object storage platforms, which was announced on May 16th.

“When deploying any software system, especially a fully open one, there are steps to go through,” said Erik Pounds, SwiftStack’s VP of Marketing. “You have to install the OS, put on software, whether from SwiftStack or someone else, and set that up. You then need to join it together and create a scale-out cluster. This software appliance does all of that. We lay down the OS and the SwiftStack software, and a wizard-driven process sets up all the networking, and joins the cluster together.”

Pounds said that this scalable cloud infrastructure for the Veeam Cloud Tier is a single-click process for the customer.

“We automatically configure the policy for Veeam, and at the end of the wizard, we hand you a URL and an S3 key and instructions how to plug it into Veeam,” he stated. “Veeam is now joined with SwiftStack so you can do cloud functions like tiering.”

The default hardware for the appliance is a Cisco UCS S3260 storage server and HyperFlex, although other options can be used.

“When a solution is automated like this, it helps to know the hardware, so the default hardware is for users who want to hit the easy button,” Pounds said. “It is fully optimized for the application. But the customers have the option of having it done another way if they want to do that.”

The rollouts with Splunk and Veeam were both strategically timed to high-profile events involving the partner vendors. The Splunk one was made at Splunk’s GovSummit event, while the Veeam one is being made at Veeam’s big VeeamON customer show.

“Once we had developed the software appliance, there is some work adding the new application profiles to make things as easy as possible, but the real work was in the best practices,” Pounds said. “We started with these two because we have very strategic partnerships with both Veeam and Splunk, which align with our go-to-market strategy. There will be more to come, and more platforms beside Cisco UCS.”

While SwiftStack sells to enterprise customers, Pounds said that the Veeam partnership is valuable to SwiftStack.

“They have 350,000 customers, and some of those are quite large,” he indicated. “Some customers who are small also store a lot of data. Our ability to help these customers is enabled by the Veeam Cloud Tier functionality, and how Veeam has evolved their strategy to manage this. Veeam is highly efficient at moving data, so is good for customers who need to manage large data sets. VCSPs will have to grow to service that massive growth of data. That’s what we are betting. We also have a strategic partnership with Cisco and that helps us navigate the waters and helps us go after the enterprise with Veeam.”

Pounds said that a new enhancement to Veeam 10 announced in the Tech Roadmap keynote on Tuesday afternoon will further enhance Veeam’s value to SwiftStack.

“The Cloud Tier feature they announced sounds minor, but it’s big,” he stated. “It allows Cloud Tier to instantly copy data off to object storage. That’s important because it makes object storage part of your near time DR strategy. Without that, you need a separate copy operation.”

Pounds also emphasized that Veeam Cloud Tier provides an optimal way of handling a hybrid cloud strategy – even though some customers haven’t fully grasped it.

“When it come to Veeam moving to cloud architectures, customers think Veeam is pushing them to the public cloud,” he said. “We see that with some of our prospects. They think hybrid means some stuff runs in a data centre and other stuff runs in a public cloud. They don’t see that a single workflow in this process can bridge the private data centre and the public cloud. That’s the right path to get people to use the public cloud. There doesn’t have to be a ‘lift and shift’ of data to it. Veeam Cloud Tier is a perfect example of that, which some people don’t think about. And that’s also what we define as hybrid – apps and workloads that encompass private and public in the same application – which allows Veeam users to store and manage more data and extract more value from data.”