Simplivity announcing All-Flash Solution today and also new DR technology which will be bundled with their platform. As the price of flash continues to fall it is just one logical step further for Simplivity, to provide fastest and more energy efficient systems. With flash being more affordable, why not to benefit better performance (up to 5x more performance with All-Flash version of Omnistack) with even higher density workloads?
Simplivity developed also new DR technology called RapidDR allowing to failover and failback in case you lose an entire site. This technology is called RapidDR, and will allow, to customers picking this option, to activate DR plan with a single click. The system allows to setup automated recovery workflows allowing you to select VMs from your infrastructure which will be failing over to the remote site.
The RapidDR allows also some advanced steps like re-ip ing the VMs if the remote site does have different IP settings, so the recovered VMs can have correct settings when they boot at the DR site. RPO can get as low as 10 min, which is sufficent in most situations. We know other products like Zerto does re-ip as well where VMware SRM needs to script that. I believe this is still the only option for SRM. I haven't worked with the latest version of SRM lately.
All Simplivity announcements
- All-Flash
- RapidDR
- Enhanced Backup with Application-Aware backups for SQL
- VDI now with 4000 office worker desktop in a single VDI building block
Simplivity All-Flash Appliance
The Simplivity's new appliance device full details weren't disclosed completely yet. All we know that the new high-performance appliance will feature some Intel S3610 SSDs and will handle between 20-40 TB.
You can see the slide below. The Intel S3610 SSDs are SATA III enterprise-class flash devices with capacities from 200Gb-1.6TB.
RapidDR:
Simplivity has already a backup solution built-in. Simplivity's OmniStack natively includes policy-based, virtual machine-centric backup and WAN-optimized replication for disaster recovery, reducing recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) from hours to minutes (10 min mini). But so far the recovery was manual. RapidDR allows automatizing all this.
This new technology allowing to set up a recovery plan. It's an extra option (paid) which allows customers to select their VMs which are critical, and make them start at the remote site.
- VMs selected for Recovery
- Power on sequence and timing
- Resource and network settings
- Pre and post-reboot scripts
It's One-click activation for recovery in case of a full site failure.
RapidDR will be available as licensed Add-on option, where the licensing is based on “per-VM” to protect. You can buy packs of 25 or 100 VMs.
- Initial Starter pack – First 25 VMs free + 1 year support $1,250
- 25 VM Protection Pack – 25 VMs (license fee – $5300) + 1 year support $1,250
- 100 VM Protection Pack – 100 VMs (license fee – $20,000)
Enhanced Backup with Application-Aware backups for Microsoft SQL Server
Simplivity can now integrate with MS SQL server. It allows you to restore individual SQL items. Previously only Full VM restore with SQL DB was possible. Also, automatic log truncation and rotation simplifies the manual tasks.
SQL Application-aware backups:
- More frequent backups – the backups put less pressure, there is less overhead, which allows more frequent backups. This yields lower RPO.
- Rapid Recovery – Fully automated restores of workloads.
- Automatic log truncation and rotation which does not need manual cleaning afterward.
Up to 4000 office worker desktops for single VDI building block
Simplivity is the only hyper-converged solution validated by LoginVSI, an independent software validation solution for VDI. They recently validated a new VDI block allowing to handle 4000 office worker desktops. (LoginVSI has several test profiles and allows testing the VDI with different VMs configs, like 1vCPU, 2vCPU, or different memory allocations. Etc).With so many desktops in a single block, you can imagine that the Capex and OpEx numbers are very low.
Simlivity has some PDF which you can download in order to see some reference architectures for VDI.
- SimpliVity OmniStack for VMware Horizon 7 – Reference Architecture
- VDI without Compromise
- Citrix XenDesktop Performance)
These papers detailed the performance characteristics we experienced when utilizing the Login VSI benchmarking. The availability of Simply DR is scheduled for October 2016.
Wrap UP:
You may have read our post when they updated their Omnistack 3.5 with Intelligent Workload optimizer which takes into account not only CPU, Memory, I/O performance, but also Data location. Additionally, they're using REST APIs allowing integration of custom and third-party applications, so customers are able to write their own scripts or applications. A quick quote concerning the workload optimizer which works hand in hand with VMware DRS.
Quote fom Simplivity's blog post:
Simplivity intelligent Workload Optimizer, which provides improved communication about data locality to vSphere DRS. The DRS integration is particularly interesting since it introduces awareness of the location of VMDKs within the OmniStack Data Virtualization Platform to DRS. This integration allows DRS to properly ensure VMs have access to the CPU and memory resources they need, while also keeping each VM local to its data. The alternative would be to have the data “follow the VM” every time a VM migrates, but that operation would be heavy, requiring unnecessary CPU, storage I/O, and network bandwidth. Instead, Intelligent Workload Optimizer’s integration with DRS does not require any data to be transferred as the VM moves to where the data is, which is much quicker and less resource intensive.
Recent Forrester paper (from Q3 2016) placed Simplivity in the leading HCI solutions as it has multi-hypervisor support, strong market presence, and strong current offering.
Quote from the report:
The Omnistack product, available as an integrated appliance based on a Cisco, Dell, or lenovo server, offers a very rich set of global multisite data management functions anchored by an always-on global deduplication architecture. It includes a comprehensive set of backup, deduplication, snapshot, and clones with multisite data replication and DR capabilities along with wide-area network (WAN) optimization.
Source: Simplivity PR