Hyper-converged infrastructure maker Simplivity has announced the latest version of its operating environment, OmniStack 3.0.
It brings new functionality that allows easy addition of nodes at remote offices and file level
restore in its backup capabilities. There is also a new remote office/branch office (ROBO) iteration of the OmniCube hyper-converged appliance, the CN1200.
Simplivity was one of the pioneers – along with Nutanix and, more recently, VMware with EVO:RAIL – of so-called hyper-converged infrastructure, which combines compute, storage and networking in one box. This is a trend in part inspired by the modular hyperscale architectures pioneered by web giants Google, Facebook, et al.
Simplivity deploys its software as a virtual machine on VMware on commodity x86 server hardware. Because of this, VMware storage is handled natively with no traditional storage formats, such as LUNs, to deal with.
So, the company’s OmniStack environment handles compute, storage, backup, replication, WAN optimisation, flash caching and cloud gateway functionality in software. Simplivity does offload heavy processing tasks to on-board PCIe cards, however.
Simplivity’s OmniStack can be bought either as OmniCube appliances from Simplivity, or as OmniStack software pre-installed on servers from partners Cisco and, announced this week, Lenovo.
Added features in version 3.0 of OmniStack include a New Deployment Manager which detects existing network topology over the WAN and connects with existing Simplivity nodes. Policies across the existing Simplivity deployment are exposed and integrated with.
Read more on hyper-converged storage
- It’s rare that a storage-related technology arises without there being any acquisitions. But hyper-converged compute/storage has seemingly sidestepped that familiar cycle.
- Nutanix CEO interview: How converged storage will make the SAN obsolete; and the threat from VMware’s VSAN storage virtualisation plans.
Meanwhile, file-level restore has been added to Simplivity’s backup capabilities, plus the ability to set backup policies across multiple virtual machines.
Finally, the company has added a branch-office targeted appliance, the CN1200.
The OmniCube set of products all combine flash storage with bulk HDD capacity. They now range from the 2.4TB remote-office CN-1200 to the enterprise/cloud provider CN-5400, which can go up to 48TB. Between those are four other offerings with increments in terms of disk capacity and quantity of RAM, with the two highest end models using 10,000rpm HDDs instead of 7,500rpm.
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