The term “Hyperconvergence” refers to the packaging or bundling of multiple hardware and software components into a single platform to give end-users a simple and rapid way to deploy applications. As a hyperconverged system (server, storage & networking resources combined with virtualization software) neatly compressed into a 2U form factor, SimpliVity’s OmniCube was designed from the ground up to provide a highly-scalable “data center in a box solution”. What’s more, multiple OmniCubes can be deployed locally or across remote data center sites and managed directly from within vCenter to provide a “federated” private or hybrid cloud infrastructure solution.
Data Virtualization Efficiency
But interestingly, OmniCube takes the next logical step by virtualizing data at the primary storage layer to drive end-to-end storage efficiencies. SimpliVity claims that by conducting inline data deduplication and compression at the point of data creation, their offering can reduce primary storage capacity requirements 2-3x and eliminate the need for a separate backup infrastructure altogether. This can potentially provide significant cost savings for businesses and dramatically reduce the burden of managing and maintaining separate backup silos in the data center.
Deduplication Offload
To ensure that deduplication doesn’t impact application performance or cause excessive wear and tear on flash resources within the OmniCube, a purpose-built PCIe card is installed in every platform to offload these processes from the storage subsystem. And, since unique changes to the data typically consume a very small sliver of hard disk drive space, IT admins can create multiple point-in-time backups of the information, retain them locally and/or efficiently replicate them to a secondary OmniCube cluster in the cloud for offsite protection. This completely eliminates the need to conduct secondary backup jobs.
In addition, with OmniCube there are no dependencies between backups So if a data protection policy consisted of taking a point-in-time backup every hour and the 12pm backup copy somehow got accidentally deleted or corrupted, a user could refer to the backup image from 1pm and still have access to a full copy of the data and all the subsequent changes that took place up until that point in time.
StorageSwiss Take
The converged infrastructure market has been seeing steady growth over the last several years. From a data center design perspective, it makes sense to deploy a pre-integrated solution which encompasses all the piece parts required to rapidly provision and deploy virtual machines. SimpliVity’s offering, however, is different from many of the other converged infrastructure systems due to the fact that their technology was built from the ground-up to incorporate all the data center infrastructure components into a single chassis. It can also be easily scaled out simply by adding OmniCubes to the environment.
Additionally, most of the offerings in this space still require a separate backup infrastructure to protect the data residing on these platforms. SimpliVity’s approach to hyperconvergence incorporates all the design elements required to quickly implement a virtualized application infrastructure, but also wraps in the data protection component. Between their in-line primary storage deduplication and data backup capabilities, SimpliVity’s offering can potentially open up the world of converged infrastructure to a much wider market.
SimpliVity is not a client of Storage Switzerland
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As a 22 year IT veteran, Colm has worked in a variety of capacities ranging from technical support of critical OLTP environments to consultative sales and marketing for system integrators and manufacturers. His focus in the enterprise storage, backup and disaster recovery solutions space extends from mainframe and distributed computing environments across a wide range of industries.
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