This San Diego VMUG session was put on by Gabriel Chapman of SimpliVity. If you’ve never heard of SimpliVity, you aren’t alone. They are a start-up and emerged from stealth mode last year, and have been shipping product for about a month. Their OmniCube is an all-in-one 2U platform consisting of compute, memory, storage, ESXi, inline de-dupe and compression, SSD, SATA and a management layer.
You no longer have to manage separate computing and storage devices. Multiple OmniCubes can be federated for high-availability and remote data replication. Two key tenants of the platform are simplicity and cost efficiency. It was a high level session, so it didn’t delve into a lot of technical details. But I did grab a few notes from the presentation:
The Promise of Convergence
- Consolidation, greater flexibility, Ease of use
- VMware enables convergence, but it’s not all roses. Increased complexity, siloed management (storage, network, compute)
Efficient Data Management Features of the OmniCube:
- Data efficiency – De-dupe and compression
- Data mobility-Â Rapid clones, replication
- Management – vCenter plug-in, globally managed
- Deployment – Simple install, VMware integrated, scale out
- Obsolete – LUN provsioning, RAID
SimpliVity OmniCube
- 3x lower acquisition cost, power and operating costs
- Combines compute, networking, storage (SSD and SATA)
- Real-time inline data dedupe/compression
- Global management
- Each cube has a standard configuraiton of memory, disk, CPUs
This looks like an interesting product for certain use cases. Could be great for branch offices where you may not have highly skilled engineers, or smaller shops that want to virtualize but don’t have virtualization and storage gurus. Or maybe departments in large companies that need to do their own thing, and want something easy, affordable, and fully converged.
San Diego VMUG: Infrastructure Convergence with SimpliVity – Derek Seaman’s Blog