Data center in a box. That growing category in all-encompassing appliances got a new member on Monday, with SimpliVity's launch of its OmniCube.
The Westborough, Mass.-based company described the new product as "the world's first, truly all-inclusive, assimilated IT infrastructure  platform" specifically designed for a virtual machine environment.
OmniCube Global Federation
The OmniCube is a 2U rack -mounted device containing a variety of storage, computing and networking services for the age of virtualization . Deployment with other OmniCubes results in an OmniCube Global Federation, a scalable pool of shared resources that provides data transfer and scalability , managed via the VMware vCenter.
Each OmniCube includes VM-based management , real-time in-line global deduplication and compression across geographies and the cloud , advanced data protection, and cache-acclerated performance. Each unit weighs 70 pounds, has two six-core Intel E5-2640 processors running at 2.5 GHz, four 250 GB solid state drives, and 24 TB in eight 3TB hard drives, with two 10Gbps Ethernet ports. The configuration of hard drives and SSDs can be adjusted as needed, and the product uses two 750W power supplies.
Chairman and CEO Doron Kempel said in a statement that, with the technology available today, "we can finally dramatically simplify IT infrastructure by assimilating all functionality, performance, protection and availability into a single, automated platform, at the hands of a VM administrator."
He added that, three years ago, the company "embarked upon the development of a new IT infrastructure that's optimized around the VM admin," which it is now debuting.
'New and Efficient Way'
While other all-in-one appliances for the data center are appearing, SimpliVity points to innovations in its offering. These include a new IT infrastructure stack called OmniStack, with a variety of patent-pending innovations and what the company called "an entirely new and efficient way of managing IT."
One of the innovations is that all data is deduplicated and compressed at inception at fine-grain 4K-8K data-sets across nodes, geographies, data centers, and the cloud. A PCIe module called the OmniCube Accelerator handles all of the algorithm processing. As a result, the company said that OmniCube replaces a variety of separate products, providing "enormous" savings in capital costs and operating expenses while improving the management of virtual machines.
The company has said it expects use cases for SimpliVity, which retails for $55,000, to include disaster recovery and primary data deduplication, particularly for VMware admins at mid-market companies.
Charles King, an analyst with industry research firm Pund-IT, said that some vendors are calling this all-in-one kind of device "an appliance, or a cloud-in-a-box," but, whatever they're called, they are part of an overall "move toward a more integrated, pre-assembled, ready-to-roll set of hardware and software components" in the increasingly consolidated data center.
SimpliVity founder and CEO Kempel had previously been CEO and founder of Diligent Technologies, which made an in-line deduplication appliance. The company was sold to IBM in 2008.
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