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SimpliVity is expanding the capabilities of its hyperconverged infrastructure portfolio to handle workloads from large enterprises through new products that include an all-flash offering, improved data protection and greater support for desktop virtualization environments.
The new offerings, announced Aug. 23 and available in the fourth quarter, further broaden the reach of SimpliVity’s technologies by enabling them to run increasingly complex workloads as enterprises look to transform their data centers to address such trends as data analytics, the proliferation of mobile devices, the internet of things (IoT) and the cloud.
SimpliVity’s latest products will help enterprises simplify their increasingly complex data centers through improved performance, better agility and greater ease of use. It also gives the vendor greater reach, from the midmarket to the most demanding enterprise workloads, according to officials.
The all-flash CN-5400-F system is an important step for SimpliVity and its customers, according to Adam Sekora, director of the office of the CTO. Customers had kept asking the vendor about bringing in an all-flash offering to complement its lineup of hybrid flash/disk products, Sekora told eWEEK. However, company officials were keeping an eye on the price, performance and reliability metrics of flash, he said.
“What we saw over the last eight to 12 months is that the price of flash precipitously dropped, with the capabilities increasing at a very good rate,” Sekora said, making this the right time to run out the all-flash offering.
With the new product, the SimpliVity can now offer a solution to handle such data-intensive workloads as online transaction processing and big data analytics. According to company officials, the all-flash system will increase application performance by up to five times and reduce latency by up to 80 percent. The software can also run on a choice of x86 platform.
“It’s a very critical part of the overall puzzle,” Sekora said.
SimpliVity also is adding to its built-in data protection offerings. The company’s new RapidDR feature enables businesses to automate disaster recovery efforts with a single click, which can help reduce disruptions in service and decrease recovery times by 70 percent or more when compared with multistep manual procedures, officials said. The feature automates the process for all virtual machines (VMs).
In addition, SimpliVity is making it easier for customers running Microsoft’s SQL Server database to automate backup and recovery efforts, an important move considering that 83 percent of SimpliVity users are running the Microsoft application on their hyperconverged infrastructures. Plus, the new offering eliminates the need for enterprises to bring on third-party backup applications, which reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the SQL Server application.
SimpliVity also is doubling the number of office worker PCs in a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment that it can support in a single VDI building block, from 2,000 to 4,000. The new capability lowers the costs per desktop for the customer and offers high-end performance in for VDIs, including providing 1,000 logins in 1,000 seconds and 1,000 desktops provisioned in 70 minutes, according to Sekora.
The new offerings come at a time when hyperconverged infrastructures are getting a lot of attention. Enterprises are looking for ways to simplify their increasingly complex data centers and to reduce costs. Converged infrastructures offer compute, networking, storage, virtualization and management software in a single appliance. Hyperconverged infrastructures take that a step further by combining compute and storage capabilities onto a highly virtualized server-based solution.
IDC analysts have said hyperconverged solutions are the fastest-growing segment in the larger converged infrastructure market and are forecasting the space to grow from $981.9 million last year to more than $4.7 billion by 2019.
Major OEMs—including Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Lenovo, Cisco Systems and Hitachi—are building out their hyperconverged portfolios. Most are partnering with such pure-play companies as SimpliVity, Nutanix, Pivot3 and Springpath, which offer software that can run on their own systems or those from other vendors.