The end game for many hyper-converged providers is pretty clear: make inroads into enterprise data centers. To do that, however, requires that these solutions bring to market the features and functionality that enterprises expect and need to effectively and easily manage them short and long term. SimpliVity’s introduction of more automation and orchestration tools into its OmniStack 3.5 technology should put enterprises on notice that SimpliVity has their data centers squarely in its sights.
Technologies that accelerate performance and/or cut costs are what give each of them the impetus for organizations need to initially adopt and use them. But for any of these technologies to break out of the mold of being point products that organizations then adopt and use them more broadly requires they introduce features that facilitate their overall ease of deployment and management.
The features found in SimpliVity’s latest OmniStack 3.5 release reflect this maturing process. These features include:
- Optimized virtual machine (VM) performance and placement. Every hyper-converged solution gives organization the flexibility to support multiple VMs. However the more VMs an organization creates, the more problematic it becomes to optimize their placement and performance across the various nodes that may exist in a hyper-converged deployment.
OmniStack 3.5 tackles this issue with its intelligent workload optimizer. This feature examines the I/O performance, data protection and capacity requirements of each VM after it is created and compares it with other VMs hosted on the solution. If the optimizer then determines the capacity and/or performance characteristics of the VM on the appliance which it was placed is undersized for the needs of the VM, it may then move the VM to the appropriate appliance within the OmniStack infrastructure.
- REST API support. Larger organizations use REST APIs with increasing frequency to automate and orchestrate the solutions within their data center. By OmniStack 3.5 offering REST API support, organizations may interact and manage OmniStack using the REST APIs just as they would any another solution in their data center.
3. Multi-node stretched clusters. One of the big appears of hyper-converged solutions is the flexibility they offer to put some nodes or appliances that are part of a cluster in one site and other nodes or appliances in another site and manage all of them as one logical cluster. While this works reasonably well on a local campus where all of the nodes in the cluster communicate over a high speed network link, this configuration can become more challenging when the nodes in a cluster must communicate over WAN links. OmniStack 3.5 better addresses these concerns by helping to manage workloads across WAN links which, in turns, provides organizations with additional options for high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR).
Then to make sure that enterprises, regardless of their size, have the confidence to deploy and use these or any of SimpliVity’s technologies, SimpliVity also introduced a couple of months ago four different support plans for organizations of different sizes. While these support plans vary, they do offer designated technical account managers and support engineers to help organizations resolve any issues that do arise as quickly as possible. Finally, for those organizations looking to deploy Microsoft Hyper-V or use it more widely in their organization, SimpliVity is actively looking to support Hyper-V going forward and, in anticipation of that, earlier this year announced the opening of offices in Seattle to partner more closely with Microsoft.
Large organizations want to adopt hyper-converged infrastructure solutions in a manner that enables them to easily deploy, manage and then support them short and long term. SimpliVity now addresses both of these concerns.
Its introduction of optimized VM performance and placement, RESTful APIs and multi-node stretched clusters as part of its OmniStack 3.5 release provide organizations with the features that they need to justify evaluating OmniStack for enterprise deployments. But just as importantly, SimpliVity complements these new features with multiple support plans as well as a plan to address Microsoft Hyper-V. This combination of features may give enterprises the confidence to move ahead with their adoption of OmniStack knowing that SimpliVity has the features, support and road map to satisfy their existing and new business and technical requirements.