Startup SimpliVity has announced a set of converged infrastructure products designed for multiple-box scalability that goes beyond competing offerings from the large vendors, writes Wikibon Principal Research Contributor Stuart Miniman. Specifically, SimpliVity’s OmniStack include backup/dedup, WAN optimization, cloud gateway functionality, and both SSD and flash caching on top of the normal integrated storage, network, compute, and management software.

Typical OmniStack deployments start with three to four cubes at a single site. It can scale to 12 cubes at six sites, and SimpliVity is talking about testing up to 512 cubes at 64 sites. The update to its portfolio includes  refresh of the OmniCube software that adds VMware VAAI support, Amazon AWS Cloud Data Center enhancements, an improved GUI, and support for expanded hardware offerings. Its three new hardware configurations come with an entry price of $27k.

Miniman sees SimpliVity’s announcement as the latest evidence supporting Wikibon Founder and CEO David Vellante’s April 2012 prediction that converged infrastructure would rapidly capture a major market share from more traditional piece-part purchases. But, he says, CIOs should avoid buying infrastructure based on immediate needs rather than the full lifecycle of the virtualized data. Backup, replication, the ability to run in a hybrid environment, and other features that SimpliVity brings to the table are important across that lifecycle.

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