For the enterprise, applications hold the keys to success, but businesses can't benefit from applications if they're down or painfully slow. And unfortunately, a majority of organizations still aren't meeting their users' demands for uninterrupted access to applications and data.[1] As a result, organizations lose, on average, US$20.1 million annually through loss of revenue and productivity. And there are many other negative impacts from outages and slow performance, such as erosion of employee and customer confidence and damage to brand integrity.

Penske Australia, a leading supplier of heavy-duty trucks, power systems, and diesel and gas engines faced these types of challenges. For example, simply loading SharePoint in the morning was so slow that employees had developed their own morning rituals while they waited.

This is why Cisco and Veeam have partnered-to help customers ensure application and data availability. Together, the two companies deliver solutions that secure, back up, and recover data wherever it resides-on premises, at the edge, and in the cloud.

By combining Cisco data center products and Veeam solutions, customers eliminate data loss and slow data recovery. This helps them reduce application downtime and easily adapt to business changes to meet even the most stringent recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).

Penske Australia installed five-node Cisco HyperFlex clusters at its primary and backup data centers, hosting approximately 200 virtual servers and all of its applications. The new environment reduced the company's footprint from 56 rack units of gear to 24. The infrastructure is also tightly integrated with VMware and Veeam and is managed by Cisco Intersight and Cisco Workload Optimization Manager. The flexibility that Cisco and Veeam provided has helped Penske Australia adapt to changing workforce needs driven by COVID.

Now, with the new infrastructure in place, everything from application performance to server updates to data center failover is faster. According to Bob Stojceski, technology and security manager at Penske Australia, "The first time we did a server update, we didn't think it rebooted. We actually had to check the logs because we had never seen anything reboot so fast. What used to take 10 minutes now takes 10 seconds."

In addition, disaster recovery is no longer a concern with the two data centers connected to each other and integrated with Veeam Availability Suite. In the past, failover took two hours, and only 70 percent of the company's systems would come back online. A recent test using Cisco HyperFlex brought up 100 percent of the company's systems in less than an hour, and application performance didn't decline. This is a big change from the application latency and user frustration caused by the slow boot times and storage bottlenecks of the past.

Regardless of your type of business, the availability of your applications and data is crucial to your success. Take a look at the joint solutions from Cisco and Veeam; they can streamline your operations, while reducing the cost and complexity involved in making sure your applications and data continue to work for you.

Learn more about the Cisco and Veeam global strategic partnership.

[1] 2019 Veeam Cloud Data Management Report