SimpliVity has extended the concept of hyperconvergence into the cloud by becoming a member of the Microsoft Cloud Alliance.
With plans to go public by year’s end, SimpliVity has been riding high on a software approach to hyperconvergence that enables IT organizations to embrace hyperconvergence across the data center, without having to acquire new classes of server and storage systems.
As a result, many solution providers and their IT organization customers have come to view the company’s OmniStack 3.0 Data Virtualization as a more natural transition toward rolling out a software-defined data center, said Marianne Budnik, chief marketing officer for SimpliVity.
What makes SimpliVity so attractive is that beyond simplifying the management of the underlying hardware, OmniStack 3.0 Data Virtualization also takes care of all the data deduplication and compression required at the time data is first ingested into the system, Budnik said. As a result, one thing that distinguishes SimpliVity is that IT organizations are using its software to run mission-critical Tier One applications on its hyperconvergence software, she said.
The end result, Budnik said, is a dramatic reduction in the amount of complexity associated with managing the overall IT environment without sacrificing performance or scalability because separate appliances to manage data deduplication and compression are no longer required.
SimpliVity already has alliances with Dell, Cisco and Lenovo as well as VMware and Microsoft. The relationship with Microsoft is now being extended in a way that provides tighter integration between SimpliVity software and the management frameworks Microsoft uses across its private and public cloud software.
Of course, Dell, Cisco, Lenovo, Microsoft and VMware all have their own offerings or relationships with third-party companies, such as Nutanix, that to one degree or another compete with SimpliVity.
However, it would appear that a software approach to hyperconvergence that is independent of both hardware and underlying hypervisors is gaining a significant amount of traction. That only goes to show that some old adages about IT organizations preferring to date hardware vendors versus marrying software providers never completely fade away.
Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for more than 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.