You may know that I have been doing a bit of work with SimpliVity over the last year or so. If you work for SimpliVity you may have heard my voice on some training materials, hope you managed to stay awake.
This week SimpliVity announced some new hardware and features.
The new hardware is an option for All-Flash OmniStack HCI nodes. All flash is a great fit for SimpliVity as they are in-line deduplicated, so there are very few overwrites of blocks on the flash. This means they don’t need to add so much special write handling or use high endurance flash. An all-flash configuration keeps the worst case IO latency low and brings more high-performance workloads into scope. I suspect there is also a simple piece of marketing where customers are demanding all-flash without any technical justification. The new all-flash configurations are available on both Lenovo and Cisco hardware as well as directly on SimpliVity OmniCube nodes.
The other new features that I like is the DR automation called RapidDR. It uses a wizard-based interface to setup automation of VM failover. It sits on top of SimpliVity’s native data protection which will replicate VM contents between data centers. I think this idea started out as a set of scripting by one of SimpliVity’s partners, to solve just one customer’s specific needs. Now the functionality has been built into the SimpliVity platform and GUI, with the improved functionality and robustness that you would expect. The only downside is thatRaipDR is a licensed capability, licensed per protected VM. I suspect it won’t be terribly expensive, so customers are unlikely to build their own scripts to replicate the functionality.
A final nice feature is an option for SQL Server log truncation when SimpliVity does an application-aware backup of the VM. I imagine that this will make a lot of DBAs happy as they won’t need to resort to manually truncating logs or using simple logging.
© 2016, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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