New Customers for SimpliVity

SimpliVity Corp., a vendor in the converged infrastructure market with its OmniCube platform, announced a collection of customers who chose OmniCube.

These customers join a growing worldwide SimpliVity install base that now consists of hundreds of sites, ranging across vertical industries, company sizes, application environments, and use cases.

OmniCube’s feature set – which incorporates the functionality of the complete IT infrastructure stack-represents a departure from the two previous generations of converged infrastructure offerings and indicates the beginning of a new phase in the development of the market.

Some have coined this new era that SimpliVity is pioneering Convergence 3.0, an indication of the differentiation compared to the two prior generations of products in the market.

The first generation of converged infrastructure products – Convergence 1.0 – was brought to market by major systems vendors, who responded to users’ pleas for simplification by bundling existing server, network and storage products together, delivered in a single rack with common management.

Second generation products -Convergence 2.0 – advanced the concept by delivering server and storage functionality with a scalable shared pool of x86 resources that consists of autonomous server-storage building blocks. OmniCube represents a giant step forward, by extending the scope of functionality delivered far beyond the primary sever-storage domain, to include all critical infrastructure functions.

Each OmniCube system is an autonomous Lego-like building block that delivers compute, hypervisor, storage, networking, cache-accelerated performance, native VM-centric backup, WAN optimization, replication for DR, and public cloud integration-thus representing a scope of functionality beyond that of prior generations of convergence.

Moreover, because of its data architecture, OmniCube enables the creation of massively scalable, shared pools of resources that deliver the full set of functionality, enabling efficiencies in the use of resources and leading to TCO savings of 2-3X traditional alternatives.

Customer recognition of the significant value above and beyond prior generations of convergence drove OmniCube’s market adoption throughout 2013.

Steve Schaaf, CTO, Francis Drilling Fluids Ltd, typifies the customer response: “We looked at a lot of other converged infrastructure solutions and found them all to be ‘one-trick ponies’ that only delivered a fraction of our requirement. In the beginning, I thought that OmniCube seemed too good be true. It really was inconceivable that we could deploy a single solution and gain all the server and storage functionality, along with the backup, and replication for DR that we needed. The superior architecture with inline deduplication eliminates the needs for other specialty devices, while allowing us to reduce our overall infrastructure spending dramatically.“

Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst of the Taneja Group, Inc. has been studying the development of the market for many years, commenting, “Converged and Hyperconverged solutions have become attractive as customers increasingly undertake initiatives to transition from legacy architectures in order to save costs and simply their environment. By adding native backup and WAN-optimized replication for DR, SimpliVity allows customers to further simplify and save costs, and therefore represents the next logical step in the evolution of the market.“

The demand for its ‘Convergence 3.0’ attributes translated into rapid growth for SimpliVity throughout 2013, and the broad appeal of OmniCube is reflected in its customer base, which spans major industries and geographies. It is deployed in hundreds of sites that range across vertical industries, company sizes, application environments, and use cases. What all customers have in common is that they leverage the functionality that is not available from other converged infrastructure offering.

Recent OmniCube Deployments Include:

Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a Massachusetts-based university, deployed it to replace a good portion of existing infrastructure, improve SLAs for application uptime, RPO and RTO and to reduce infrastructure costs by more than half. The institution was driven to purchase OmniCube due to its native data protection functionality, which simplifies local and remote backup.

Jon Bartelson, assistant CIO, commented: “We had analyzed several converged offerings but did not see significant savings and recognized that they would not address our backup and DR environments, which were a major area of concern. SimpliVity’s OmniCube was an easy decision as soon as we quickly recognized the impact it would have across our entire virtualized environment.“

Francis Drilling Fluids, a Louisiana-based company and a large drilling fluids supplier on the Gulf Coast and in logistics operations for the fracking industry, purchased three OmniCube systems to replace their legacy environment while improving data protection and DR.

Dairylea Cooperative, Inc., a milk marketing organization in the Northeast, replaced their 80TB SAN in addition to their entire backup and DR environment with 6 OmniCube systems, solving their decade-long battle with backup and recovery.

Jeremy Wheeler, Innovation architect for Dairylea, commented: “After months of analyzing alternative infrastructure solutions, we discovered SimpliVity’s OmniCube and were quickly convinced. We recognized that SimpliVity’s innovative data architecture would offer superior functionality while allowing us to reduce costs. Within 12 days, we decided to standardize on OmniCube for all of our virtualized workloads, and purchased our first 6 systems. OmniCube allowed us to replace our SAN environments in two sites, while introducing significant improvements to backup and DR-all at a price point lower than what we would have paid simply to deploy a new traditional backup system.“

Worcester County Sheriff’s Office, Sheriff’s department for the second largest city in Massachusetts prides itself on leveraging technology to deliver more rapid responses and general overall services to its constituents. However, continual budget constraints were hampering the team’s ability to innovate and improve services. In OmniCube, the team recognized the opportunity drop annual infrastructure costs to less than half the current level while resolving various backup and recovery issues that had been hampering the team for several years.

A large US city government administration purchased OmniCube to consolidate all VMs and their data into an easy to use system that deploys rapidly and is easy to manage. The city now uses it to run its critical Intergraph Record Management System (RMS) application, which drives dispatching and logging for police, 911, and employees working around the city. The IT team had done an analysis of several other converged offerings, but concluded that SimpliVity was the better choice based on the broad scope of functionality that would address all of their requirements. Native backup and DR were key criteria for their solution, and one of the primary drivers for their adoption of OmniCube.

“SimpliVity turned out to be different, not just a better version of what we already have,” said the CIO. “This is a really creative solution that gives us everything we needed within our budget. We’d never have been able to achieve the results we get with OmniCube using the traditional vendors.“

iON123, Inc., an IT services provider and VAR located in Jacksonville, FL, uses OmniCube in its production environment to reduce datacenter footprint, streamline operations and to improve backup and DR. Based on its success, iON123 became a SimpliVity reseller.

Stu Miniman, Wikibon principal research contributor, commented: “Users are increasingly turning to converged infrastructure architectures to increase agility and lower operational expenses. By baking in advanced services such as data protection and DR, SimpliVity’s OmniCube reduces the complexity of the IT stack.“

“Our customers continually explain to us and their peers that the driving interest in OmniCube is the broad scope of native functionality that is well integrated and synthesized into the single product,” explained Doron Kempel, founder and CEO, SimpliVity. “By delivering all key data center infrastructure functions with a single, efficient shared resource pool, we enable 3X cost savings while bringing enterprise grade functionality to customers around the world. Customers increasingly recognize the need to address all infrastructure functions as a whole, rather than continuing to struggle with the complexity of the status quo. Essentially, they are demanding Convergence 3.0, and the extraordinary success and demand for OmniCube that SimpliVity has seen in 2013 demonstrates that.“