HPE boosts vision with SimpliVity acquisition

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Published 13-Jun-2017 10:23:38
How does the SimpliVity acquisition enhance HPE’s hyper convergence vision
 
Before  HPE’s $650 million acquisition of SimpliVity in January 2017, it was already firmly focused on the hyper converged market. With spending in this market expected to reach $19 billion by 2018, according to Gartner, anything HPE could do to bolster its position made good sense.

HPE’s big hyper converged infrastructure push

Not heard of hyper convergence? In a nutshell, because many enterprises have legacy IT environments that are not well suited for today’s cloud-based services and on-demand applications, developers need new tools to easily develop, scale and protect data. A ‘hyper converged’ infrastructure, is a more cost- efficient way of handling data centre-scale server storage, as a hyper converged system integrates compute, storage and networking into a pre-configured system, managed by a user-friendly software platform that doesn’t require extensive IT staff for set up and management.

SimpliVity was founded in 2009 to create software-defined, hyper converged infrastructures, designed from the ground up to meet the needs of enterprise customers who require on-premises technology infrastructure with enterprise-class performance, data protection, and resiliency, with commercial advantages akin to cloud. The combined HPE and SimpliVity portfolio offers a rich set of enterprise data services across hyper converged, 3PAR storage, composable infrastructure and multi-cloud offerings.

HPE’s CEO Meg Whitman noted: “More and more customers are looking for solutions that bring them secure, highly resilient, on-premises infrastructure at cloud economics.  That’s exactly where we’re focused.”

What will HP do with SimpliVity?

Adding SimpliVity’s innovative technology to HPE’s hyper converged portfolio provides significant additional benefits to customers, including:

  • Built-in enterprise data protection and resiliency that simplifies backup and enables customers to more quickly restore operations.
  • Enterprise storage utilisation and virtual machine (VM) efficiency that helps customers control cost and performance.
  • Always-on compression and de-duplication that guarantees 90 per cent capacity savings across storage and backup.
  • Policy-based VM-centric management that simplifies operations and enables data mobility, making development teams and end users more productive.

As noted below, HPE is now offering SimpliVity Omni Stack software for its ProLiant DL380 servers, and in the second half of 2017 it will offer a range of integrated HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged systems based on HPE ProLiant Servers. 

Once commentator highlights that the ‘pure-play on-premises data centre’ is “basically dead” now. Global cloud providers continue to gain traction, but for organisations that need hybrid cloud the SimpliVity acquisition really beefs up HPE’s story. Having technology that can bring data from remote office/branch office sites back to the primary data centre, or moving workloads between primary data centres and public cloud without racking up high bandwidth costs may prove very beneficial.

In the long term, HPE servers and equipment look like they are going to come with all the tech needed to manage internetworking and mobile connectivity effectively. Access to SimpliVity’s technology is part of that vision.

It’s even been suggested that SimpliVity's deduplication is better than what HPE 3PAR is using now, and there’s speculation that SimpliVity tech could eventually end up in HPE storage arrays.

how does the simplivity acquisition enhance HPE's hyper convergence vision

How quickly will we really see combined products?

The first result of the HPE/SimpliVity collaboration was announced in March 2017.

Now HPE has qualified SimpliVity software on its ProLiant DL380 server, it will now sell it as the HPE SimpliVity 380 with OmniStack. Mark Linesch, the vice president for global strategy and operations of HPE's enterprise group, also said that HPE will continue to provide the same support for SimpliVity’s OmniCube hardware as SimpliVity did, although going forward, it hopes to see more customers on the ProLiant version.

He added that SimpliVity used to guarantee that the OmniCube would offer a 90 per cent capacity saving across production and backup storage while improving application performance, and HPE will offer the same guarantee for the SimpliVity 380.

According to InfoWorld, HPE's two hyper convergence product lines will undergo some convergence of their own at some point in the future, combining the best features of the SimpliVity 380 and the Hyper Converged 380 into a new product line, Linesch said.

At Vohkus we’ve already worked on HPE hyper convergence projects, and we think the enhanced product line and roadmap is going to represent great value for our customers.

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