IDC Technology Spotlight on the Importance and Value of the Flex Appliance
Access the full IDC Technology Spotlight here: Simplifying Data Protection with Next-Generation Converged Infrastructure. KEY TAKEAWAYS Flex Appliance may be the most important product announcement by Veritas since the company split from Symantec some years ago. Flex Appliance is a new architecture designed specifically for modern data protection workloads. It also offers an important bridge back to NetBackup environments that should provide this large group of users a logical and simple path forward. Veritas is among the first major vendors to move into this rapidly emerging and growing product category. It does so with the clear advantage of a large, receptive installed base and with credibility built on its successful NetBackup appliance. Flex Appliance's microservices architecture is also built to address the diverse data protection and management needs of specific business units and applications. Thus, as a single system, it can simultaneously provide consolidated data protection operations with the ability to deliver microservices on a best-in-class basis for specific workloads. We believe that Flex Appliance may be the key to Veritas retaining its market-leading position in the data protection and recovery market. More on the Flex Appliance here:Veritas Flex ApplianceBreaking News! Veritas Doubles Appliance Offerings
Its big news! Since March we’ve double our appliances portfolio, launched our first storage system the Access 3340 Appliance, and the Flex Appliance, our first containerized data protection solution. The Access Appliance is a purpose-built storage solution for long term retention of backup and, archive data and other retention-type use cases such as video surveillance and healthcare PACs image data. Not surprisingly, The Access Appliance is built on our popular Veritas Accessscale-out NAS software. The Flex Appliance is a very clever platform for delivering Veritas data protection services including NetBackupand CloudCatalyst. Rather than running these appson dedicated servers, with the Flex Appliance, multiple data protection services are deployed in containers on a single appliance. Turn on a data protection or cloud tiering service as needed, without touching additional hardware. The containerized, microservices architecture of the Flex Appliance even goes a lot further than hyperconverged when it comes to simplifying infrastructure and the speed and ease of deployment as it supports multiple NBU domains and CloudCatalyst instances simultaneously. I can guess what you’re thinking. Why is Veritas offering more and more appliances when everything Veritas has been software defined? The primary reason; many of you in the community have asked us to. Particularly for Access. There’s a unique aspect to our appliances. A secret I'll share with my readers. Shhhhh. They’re still software defined. The software license is decoupled from the hardware we deliver it on. Here’s a couple examples of what I mean. Let’s say you purchase an Access 3340 Appliance, and a year from now you find a shiny, new storage server. You can move the Access software license to that new hardware. It also works the other way around. Maybe you’re running NBU software today on a white box server but want to upgrade to the Flex Appliance. No problem. That license you already have can be used to enable NBU on Flex (assuming minimum supported version, of course). Veritas appliances are really the best of both worlds. All the benefits of a software-based solution with the peace of mind that you’re not locked into Veritas hardware. I’m thinking we should have called them un-appliances. What do you think? Please add your thoughts and comments to the discussion.
