This project was a data center proof of concept for a Swiss enterprise customer with a relatively mature infrastructure landscape. The environment was built around two data centers, DC1 and DC2, plus a remote disaster recovery node, so the objective was never just to deploy a standalone platform, but to validate a complete cross-site high-availability and backup recovery design.
From a business perspective, this type of customer typically places a very high value on infrastructure stability, service continuity, and operational verifiability. That means the real focus is not only whether the platform works under normal conditions, but whether workloads can remain available and data can still be recovered when failures happen across sites.
The core idea behind this project was to evaluate whether a CAS + CB7000 solution could serve as an alternative to the more traditional VMware + Veeam combination. For that reason, many parts of the design and validation process were organized around capabilities that are usually expected from a VMware-class solution, including virtualization management, migration, high availability, backup, and recovery.
In practical terms, the PoC was structured around three major validation areas: VMware environment management and migration to CAS, stretched cluster verification across DC1 and DC2, and CB7000 backup with recovery to the DR node. Together, these formed the baseline for assessing whether the alternative solution could deliver a consistent enterprise-grade outcome rather than just isolated feature demos.
This project was not about spinning up another platform. It was about proving that a real alternative could work in a real enterprise environment.
Here is what I wanted to validate: