As the whole technology world (or at least those intimately involved with the enterprise data center space) takes a breath before diving head first into VMworld next week, a few vendors are jumping the gun and making product announcements in advance of it. One of those is SimpliVity which announced its latest hyper-converged offering, OmniStack 3.0, this past Wednesday. In so doing, it continues to put a spotlight on why hyper-converged infrastructures and the companies delivering them are experiencing hyper-growth even in a time of relative market and technology uncertainty.
The business and technology benefits that organizations are experiencing who are already using hyper-converged infrastructure solutions are pretty stunning. SimpliVity shared that among the organizations who already use its solutions, one of the largest benefits that they realize is the reduction in the amount of storage that they need to procure and manage across their enterprise.
In that vein, about 33 percent or 180 of its 550+ customers achieve 100:1 data efficiency. In layman’s terms, for each 1TB of storage that they deploy as part of the SimpliVity OmniCube family, they eliminate the need to deploy an additional 99TBs of storage.
In calculating this ratio, SimpliVity measures the additional storage capacity across production, archive and backup that organizations normally would have had to procure using traditional data center management architectures and methods. By instead deploying and managing this storage capacity as part of a hyper-converged infrastructure and then deduplicating and compressing the data stored in it, many of its customers report hyper-storage reductions accompanied by similar cost savings.
In its OmniStack 3.0 announcement from earlier this week, SimpliVity builds upon this foundation so organizations and/or enterprises may more fully experience its benefits regardless of their size or location. Two key new feature that its OmniStack 3.0 release delivers:
- Right-sized, right-priced product for ROBOs. The OmniCube CN-1200 delivers most if not all of the software functionality that SimpliVity’s larger models offer and does so in a form factor (~2.7TB usable) appropriately sized for remote and branch offices (ROBOs). The more intriguing part of this story, however, is that the CN-1200 may be managed centrally alongside all of the other SimpliVity models in a common console. In this way, ROBOs can get the benefits of having a hyper-converged solution in their environment without needing to manage it. They can instead leave those management responsibilities to the experts back in the corporate data center.
- Centralized, automated data protection and recovery for ROBOs. I have personally always found it perplexing that application data management and data protection and recovery are largely treated as two separate, discrete tasks within data centers when they are so interrelated. Hyper-converged infrastructure solutions as a whole have been actively breaking down this barrier with the OmniStack 3.0 blasting another sizeable hole in this wall in two different ways as it pertains to ROBOs.
First, SimpliVity has created a hub and spoke architecture. Using this topology, the hub or central management console dynamically probes the enterprise network, detects models in these ROBO locations and then adds them to its database of managed devices. This is done without requiring any user input at the ROBO locations.
Second, data protection and recovery are done in its central management console so no additional backup software is necessarily required. The new feature in its OmniStack 3.0 release is the option to change backup policies in bulk. In this way, organizations that have ROBOs across dozens of offices with perhaps hundreds or even thousands of VMs in them can centrally add, change or update a backup or restore policy and then apply that change across all of the protected VMs in as quickly as a minute.
Using this built-in data protection feature, SimpliVity reports that 63 percent or approximately 345 of its customers can now perform recoveries of any of its applications across its enterprise in minutes as opposed to hours or days.
VMworld 2015 may have the industry as a whole hitting the pause button until everyone sees what types of announcements that VMware makes. However hyper-converged infrastructure providers such as SimpliVity are hitting the fast-forward button by bringing solutions to market that are forcing organizations of all size to re-think how they are going to deploy and implement virtualized infrastructures going forward.
No longer can or should organizations treat and manage hypervisors, data management and data protection software and server, storage and networking hardware as separate purchases that are then left to IT managers to configure and make work. By delivering these as single, comprehensive hyper-converged solutions with SimpliVity in particular making its OmniCube models more price competitive and even easier to deploy and manage in ROBOs, it is no wonder that more organizations are taking a hard look at deploying this type of solution in their environments.