Home > Tech Field Day, VFD4, Virtualisation Field Day > Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview: SimpliVity

Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview: SimpliVity

January 8th, 2015

Virtualisation Field Day 4 is happening in Austin, Texas from 14th-16th January and I’m very lucky to be invited as a delegate.

I’ve been previewing the companies attending, have a look at my introductory post: Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview.

SimpliVity is a just over two year old shipping hyper-converged infrastructure vendor who is making great strides in a very hot market segment. Simplivity are presenting for the 1st time at Virtualisation Field Day. They compete against the fierce marketers and Dell buddies Nutanix and have recently partnered up with Cisco which gives them more enterprise clout and a huge partner network.

Their unique selling point is a fantastic data reduction and replication engine along with global management. Data is compressed and deduped at ingestion and can be replicated still reduced very efficiently to other instances. If you have to move VM disk files around multiple offices, across the globe or backup to the cloud with AWS, SimpliVity is a great choice. They only support vSphere at the moment as their management is via a plug-in to vCenter which isn’t as easy to port to other hypervisors. They have mentioned KVM with OpenStack and Hyper-V are coming sometime so perhaps they have some news to share at VFD4.

SimpliVity has traditionally used Dell servers under their logo which makes for a complicated relationship since Dell is now in bed with Nutanix so I wonder if there are hardware changes afoot. SimpliVity is composed of two parts, the SimpliVity software along with a PCI-E hardware card which does all the clever deduping in real time reducing the IOPS that need to be sent to storage and allowing that clever and efficient global replication. This makes them not an entirely software solution which the SDDC purists will knock down but with advances in CPU processing perhaps this hardware reliance will be removed which would open up their options.

Their tie-up with Cisco is very interesting. SimpliVity on UCS is only just over 6 weeks old. Cisco has not come out with an EVO:Rail version so must be looking to SimpliVity to provide their hyper-converged solution with UCS rack mounted hardware they need alongside their converged UCS blade based Vblocks and FlexPods. UCS has done incredibly well which is good news for SimpliVity.

Cisco gives them a massive sales force into very closed ecosystem enterprises but I would presume be pushing for Hyper-V and KVM/OpenStack support seeing Vblocks are now an EMC thing with much closer ties to VMware.

Gestalt IT is paying for travel, accommodation and things to eat to attend Virtualisation Field Day but aren’t paying a penny for me to write anything good or bad about anyone.

Comments are closed.