It has been a few months since I last got an update for SimpliVity, so the launch of their OmniStack V3.61 was a good reason for an update.
• There are some nice manageability updates in this version. You can now take an existing SimpliVity cluster and convert it into a stretch cluster. The SimpliVity Data Virtualization Platform will redistribute the VM data copies across the nodes. Then advise you when it is safe to relocate half the nodes to another datacenter.
• The deployment and upgrade processes have been simplified and made more robust. They now use what I call a “Trust and Validate” approach to verify all the configuration settings provided by the customer.
• I wasn’t surprised to hear that VDI has been a huge growth area for SimpliVity. Their first VDI Reference Architecture had some amazing numbers for user density, which lead to great cost per user desktop. In this release, they have a VDI license model for OmniStack. A discounted license cost that disables the backup and replication features. These features are seldom used in VDI deployments. SimpliVity has also published (or are about to publish) Reference Architectures for a few VDI platforms: Epic healthcare, Workspot, and Citrix XenDesktop 7.11.
• One aspect of SimpliVity that I like is the use of compute nodes. There are hypervisor hosts that consume the SimpliVity datastores. Essentially delivering more compute capacity to the cluster. SimpliVity support compute nodes as a normal part of a deployment, rather than just as a migration process.
• The other news from SimpliVity is that their partnership with Huawei has been very successful. This Chinese company’s name is not well accepted in the US. The rest of the world has a lot of Huawei equipment, particularly in telco businesses. Expect to see more models of Huawei servers supported as OmniStack nodes in the future.
Disclosure: in 2015 & 2016 SimpliVity was a customer of mine. I have written training materials and white papers for them, I also have many friends at SimpliVity. SimpliVity did not solicit or have any control over this blog post (or any other on demitasse.co.nz)
© 2017, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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