SimpliVity goes all flash; opens up new doors for local resellers

SimpliVity has served up new all-flash hyperconverged system, complete with a one-click disaster recovery solution and application-aware capability in a move the company says enables local resellers to take incremental market share.

The expanded hyperconvergence portfolio is designed to provide new offerings and capabilities for core enterprise workloads and globally distributed data centers.

Scott Morris, SimpliVity Asia Pacific and Japan vice president, says the new portfolio elevates the opportunity for partners to go after 'the extremely high performance, mission critical application space that is typically the domain of the traditional IT suppliers'.

"We have an underlying architecture that includes not just server and storage capacity – we're talking whole of data center replacement technology and spanning everything from SMB to enterprise capability with the launch of the latest portfolio.

He says that provides resellers with a highly differentiated offering, for a total addressable market – covering server, storage and backup components – valued at up to US$120 billion globally.

"Asia Pacific represents about 17% to 18% of the global market so that's $17 billion to $20 Billion in APAC," he notes. "ANZ would probably represent about 20%- 25% of that marketplace.

James St Laurent, SimpliVity vice president of product strategy, says the new offerings 'get at the heart of some of the most common issues plaguing our customers – workload, data protection and scalability and will benefit both enterprise and mid market customers.

The new all-flash solutions provides peak and predicatable performance for 'the most data-intensive applications' including online transaction processing and big data analytics.

Morris says it provides 'phenonmenal' performance increases over SimpliVity's previous systems.

"We're talking up to five times overall performance and massive latency reduction by up to 50% to 80%, which is pretty staggering considering some of the performance we were seeing out of our hybrid systems," Morris says.

The vendor has also announced RapidDR, for faster, simplified recovery of workloads.

Morris says SimpliVity is the only hyperconverged player with integrated data protection as part of its core portfolio.

"It is a push button approach to disaster recovery in as little as five clicks to set up a fully automated process.

Meanwhile, application-aware backups provide more automation and tighter integration for tier-one apps, specifically Microsoft SQL databases.

"Now you're getting very tightly integrated backup and recovery capability with SQL and you will start to see more granularity coming in for other application-specific backups," Morris says.

New VDI reference architecture includes the ability to support up to 4000 officer worker desktops in a single VDI building block.

Morris says the offerings enable local resellers to help customers address 'the biggest elephant in the room' – how to reduce operating expense.

"For far too long we focused on the capital expenditure side and how to squeeze the next percentage reduction from vendors on a capex perspective.

"Our value proposition says if we can take out 70% to 80% of your current operating expense through simplification and lowering of cost through using just a fraction of the technology you're currently installing, it frees up capital to do new projects, innovate and do the next big project they had in mind.

He says SimpliVity is offering a 10:1 rack consolidation for a whole of data center capability.

"We're talking server, storage, tier one and tier two, three backup and archive, recovery and caching all built into a single 2U building block.

"That is just staggering.

He cites the example of a Fortune 50 finanical services company which consolidated its six data centers, including two in Asia Pacific, down to three data centers. "In the US data center alone, they went from 34 racks of legacy IT down to just three racks of systems supplied by SimpliVity to give a higher performance and the equivalent functionality of the previous 34 racks.

New services opportunities

 Morris says the offerings provide 'a fantastic opportunity' for new services opportunities for resellers.

"Right now there is a massive component of the reseller community actively missing out on services, which are just washing out into large mega-clouds.

"We have a value proposition that says with a SimpliVity based cloud platform – a private cloud on SimpliVity – we can be anywhere between 22% and 47% cheaper than the equivalent service provided in AWS.

"This creates a massive opportunity for partners to now establish competitive cloud offerings for everything from platform-as-a-service, DR-as-a-service, backup-as-a-service – all of these core services, where at the moment resellers are becoming a potential broker to push stuff into AWS and lose control of those workloads over time.

"We can be an anchor to go out to their target markets and customers and anchor them in their own professional services and services portfolios.