Published on the 04/09/2015 | Written by Donovan Jackson

Hyperconvergence infrastructure provider Simplivity has released new software with a slew of hyperbole…

Terms like ‘groundbreaking’, ‘accelerated leadership’, ‘revolutionise’, and even ‘unleashed’ featured prominently in the press release for its ‘OmniStack 3.0’ software.

The use of such adjectives are seldom backed up by real substance in the tech industry, so iStart got on the phone to Scott Morris, Singapore-based VP APAC at the company, to check the claims.

“The founding principle and mission [of SimpliVity] is to simplify data centre infrastructure. That is as simple as it gets. It is also a bold statement and you’ll see a significant overall saving and reduction in TCO of up to 300 percent,” he said.

When we recently spoke with a new customer of the vendor, which established operations in this part of the world just 14 months ago, what stood out most was that he had no idea what SimpliVity was all about, instead trusting the advice of a reseller partner. “That’s part of the challenge,” agreed Morris, “I left an executive position to start [the APAC office] on my own. We’re now up to 28 people and we need to continue working hard to get the message out there.”

Morris explained that the approach being taken is to target mid-size customers who are struggling to cope with data centre complexity, explaining that SimpliVity is seeking quick wins to prove its mettle, rather than dealing with the slower-grinding gears of corporate-dom.

Part of the problem with name-recognition is the relatively new category represented by hyperconvergence. Gartner’s gotten on board, however, and recently made a statement which fits well with the hype. “We believe that highly virtualized midsize enterprises with fewer than 200 virtual machines should absolutely opt for hyperconverged infrastructure,” wrote research director Mike Cisek and research vice president Jeffrey Hewitt in a report titled ‘Simplify the Midmarket Data Center with Hyperconverged Infrastructure Solutions’.

And what of the hyperbole? “We are a little over-conservative in our messages [!] as [the new software, OmniStack 3.0] delivers more than what it says on the tin. We even have the HyperGuarantee, so I would argue no other vendor is putting as bold a statement out there backed by a guarantee. You’ll save 90 percent on a backup, for example. If it is 10TB, it will come down to 1TB. That has a material impact on recoverability.”

Morris colourfully said SimpliVity could take on the ‘biggest, ugliest virtual machine’ and back it up in ‘sub-minute’ timeframes. “These are measurable benefits. In every implementation, customers are blown away by the results they are seeing.”

He said there are around 100 customers in the APAC region to date, with the first in New Zealand already operating; “We’ll talk about that soon. The customer wanted a 30 day right of return, but after a week said they wouldn’t be sending anything back.”

Morris said that growing footprint means a critical mass has been reached. “A month ago I would have said we’re creeping up to that point. Generally now, though, customers have a reasonable idea of what hyperconvergence is, and a view of the competitive layup of the players – and none can do what we can, and that’s likely to put us two or three years ahead of anyone else.”

Big promises? “Absolutely. And we’re happy to stand by them.”

Highlights of SimpliVity’s software release include:

• Optimised for ROBO (Remote Office Back Office) – Automatic multi-site network discovery, addresses management and data protection requirements of remote office/branch offices.
• Enterprise-grade performance and scalability for single-site deployments –architected to support single-site deployments with up to 30% increase in performance for workloads like Microsoft Exchange and OLTP.
• New Deployment Manager speeds deployment times fivefold –deploys multiple nodes in parallel for single-site and multi-site deployments.

The ‘HyperGuarantee’ promises:

• 90 percent capacity savings across storage and backup combined.
• 60-seconds or less, on average, for local backup or restore of a 1 TB VM.
• 3 clicks to backup, restore, clone or move a VM from a single console.
• 60-seconds or less, on average, to create or update backup policies for 1000s of VMs across dozens of remote sites from a single console.
• Add or remove a local or remote SimpliVity system without downtime, without interruption to local or remote backups, and without reconfiguration of backup policies or IP addresses