The complexity of hybrid infrastructure gets devilish at the application layer where the needs of traditional bare-metal and cloud-native apps often clash. “The network brings this together,” according to Frank Palumbo (pictured, right), senior vice president at Cisco Systems Inc.

Applications must be able to move about the network free of infrastructure conflicts, Palumbo stated. Palumbo joined Andy Vandeveld (pictured, left), vice president of global alliances at Veeam Software Inc. in an interview during this year’s VeeamOn event in New Orleans, Louisiana. They spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.) 

Putting the application first, the next step is making sure the network is flexible enough to accommodate all varieties of apps, Palumbo explained, adding that moving a virtual machine around a network fabric is fairly easy. Moving a bare-metal workload around a fabric — especially statelessly, the way  Cisco Unified Computing System does — is much harder, he stated.

“That’s why we have the abstraction layer with what we call the Fabric Interconnects with UCS to do that,” he said.

Data availability is apps’ lifeblood

Cisco has partnered with Veeam Software Inc. to integrate Veeam’s backup and restore capabilities into its hyperconverged and storage products such as the Cisco UCS S-Series storage server.

“We’re very proud of our S-Series storage server,” Palumbo said. “But it really doesn’t come together unless you’ve got the application that will run with it.” The Veeam partnership has filled in a key piece of application availability on the server, he added.

Veeam provides “availability of the data, which makes the applications available and which basically makes the business stay up and running,” Vandeveld said. The Cisco partnership should allow Veeam access to large enterprises, he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VeeamOn 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VeeamOn 2017. Neither Veeam Software Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE