Michael Cade

It's a good job you're sat over there, Justin.

Everyone knows Flexloan.

If you're listening to this podcast, you've probably heard of the Flexloan capabilities that NetApp brings to the table here.

And I'm speaking from a partner that installed, architected NetApp solutions going way back.

And when Flexloan first comes, it is a great feature.

But nine times out of ten, people aren't using it because of the cumbersome approach to be able to bring all of those application groups together and fire them up and then clean them away.

So what Veeam can do, and I've recorded a few sessions on this and I've submitted one for insight if everyone's out there that can vote for that.

is around FlexClone on steroids.

So being able to take those snapshots that are in an application-consistent state, being able to take them from different volumes, even different FAS arrays, if need be, or ONTAP systems, but be able to then pull them together in an application group, send them to a virtual switch within VMware, and that virtual switch can span several.

It can use distributed virtual switches or it can use standard.

be able to spin those application groups up.

So let's say, for example, a web server front end backed by SQL, and it requires some dependencies around DNS and AD authentication, and they're in different tiers of storage across the estate.

What we can do is we'll take...

We'll take those snapshots.

We'll turn them into the FlexClone that's a space-efficient clone of the volume.

We'll present that as a data store, and we'll spin up the virtual machines that we require, the Active Directory, the SQL Server, as well as the web server.

in the specific order that we tell it.

And then from there, it's in an isolated network.

It's on that isolated vSwitch.

People, the dev team, test dev, troubleshooting, et cetera, can now jump into that on that space-efficient LAN or volume, work away on that, and then we can drop that down automatically from Veeam, tidying away all the flex clones, tidying away all the virtual machines from the VMware estate as well.