[January 27, 2014]

Acceleration of SimpliVity Customer Deployments Exemplify New Era in Converged Infrastructure

SimpliVity, the leading vendor in the converged infrastructure market with its award winning OmniCube^TM platform, today announced a collection of customers who chose OmniCube based on features and functionality not found in any other converged infrastructure offering. These new customers join a rapidly growing worldwide SimpliVity install base that now consists of hundreds of sites globally, ranging across vertical industries, company sizes, application environments, and use cases. OmniCube's broad feature set--which incorporates the functionality of the complete IT infrastructure stack-represents a significant departure from the two previous generations of converged infrastructure offerings and indicates the beginning of a new phase in the development of the market.

Some have coined this new era that SimpliVity is pioneering "Convergence (News - Alert) 3.0", an indication of the significant differentiation compared to the two prior generations of products in the market. The first generation of converged infrastructure products-"Convergence 1.0"-- was brought to market by major systems vendors, who responded to users' pleas for simplification by bundling existing server, network and storage products together, delivered in a single rack with common management. Second generation products-"Convergence 2.0"-advanced the concept by delivering server and storage functionality with a scalable shared pool of x86 resources that consists of autonomous server-storage building blocks. SimpliVity's OmniCube represents a giant step forward, by extending the scope of functionality delivered far beyond the primary sever-storage domain, to include all critical infrastructure functions. Each OmniCube system is an autonomous Lego-like building block that efficiently delivers compute, hypervisor, storage, networking, cache-accelerated performance, native VM-centric backup, WAN optimization, replication for disaster recovery, and public cloud integration-thus representing a scope of functionality far beyond that of prior generations of convergence. Moreover, because of its unique data architecture, OmniCube enables the creation of massively scalable, shared pools of resources that deliver the full set of functionality, enabling significant efficiencies in the use of resources and leading to tremendous TCO savings of 2-3X traditional alternatives.

Customer recognition of the significant value above and beyond prior generations of convergence drove OmniCube's rapid market adoption throughout 2013. Steve Schaaf, Chief Technical Officer for Francis Drilling Fluids typifies the customer response: "We looked at a lot of other converged infrastructure solutions and found them all to be 'one-trick ponies' that only delivered a fraction of our requirement. In the beginning, I thought that OmniCube seemed too good be true. It really was inconceivable that we could deploy a single solution and gain all the server and storage functionality, along with the backup, and replication for DR that we needed. The superior architecture with inline deduplication eliminates the needs for other specialty devices, while allowing us to reduce our overall infrastructure spending dramatically."

Arun Taneja, Founder and Consulting Analyst of the Taneja Group has been studying the development of the market for many years, recently commenting, "Converged and Hyperconverged solutions have become attractive as customers increasingly undertake initiatives to transition from legacy architectures in order to save costs and simply their environment. By adding native backup and WAN-optimized replication for DR, SimpliVity allows customers to further simplify and save costs, and therefore represents the next logical step in the evolution of the market."

The high demand for its "Convergence 3.0" attributes translated into remarkably rapid growth for SimpliVity throughout 2013, and the broad appeal of OmniCube is reflected in its customer base, which spans all major industries and geographies. OmniCube today is deployed in hundreds of sites globally, that range across vertical industries, company sizes, application environments, and use cases. What all OmniCube customers have in common is that they leverage the functionality that is not available from any other converged infrastructure offering.

Recent OmniCube Deployments Include:

• Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a Massachusetts-based university, recently deployed OmniCube to replace a good portion of existing infrastructure, significantly improve SLAs for application uptime, RPO and RTO and to reduce infrastructure costs by more than half. The institution was driven to purchase OmniCube due to its native data protection functionality, which simplifies local and remote backup. Jon Bartelson, assistant CIO commented: "We had analyzed several converged offerings but did not see significant savings and recognized that they would not address our backup and DR environments, which were a major area of concern. SimpliVity's OmniCube was an easy decision as soon as we quickly recognized the impact it would have across our entire virtualized environment."
• Francis Drilling, a Louisiana-based company and one of the largest drilling fluids suppliers on the Gulf Coast and a leader in logistics operations for the fracking industry, purchased three OmniCube systems to replace their legacy environment while dramatically improving data protection and disaster recovery.
• Dairylea Cooperative, the largest milk marketing organization in the Northeast, replaced their 80 TB SAN in addition to their entire backup and DR environment with 6 OmniCube systems, solving their decade-long battle with backup and recovery. Jeremy Wheeler, Innovation Architect for Dairylea, commented, "After months of analyzing alternative infrastructure solutions, we discovered SimpliVity's OmniCube and were quickly convinced. We recognized that SimpliVity's innovative data architecture would offer superior functionality while allowing us to significantly reduce costs. Within 12 days, we decided to standardize on OmniCube for all of our virtualized workloads, and purchased our first 6 systems. OmniCube allowed us to replace our SAN environments in two sites, while introducing significant improvements to backup and DR-all at a price point lower than what we would have paid simply to deploy a new traditional backup system."
• Worcester County Sheriff's Office: The Sheriff's department for the second largest city in Massachusetts prides itself on leveraging technology to deliver more rapid responses and general overall services to its constituents. However, continual budget constraints were hampering the team's ability to innovate and improve services. In OmniCube, the team immediately recognized the opportunity drop annual infrastructure costs to less than half the current level while resolving various backup and recovery issues that had been hampering the team for several years.
• A large US city government administration purchased OmniCube to consolidate all VMs and their data into an easy to use system that deploys rapidly and is easy to manage. The city now uses OmniCube to run its critical Intergraph Record Management System (RMS) application, which drives dispatching and logging for police, 911, and employees working around the city. The IT team had done an extensive analysis of several other converged offerings, but concluded that SimpliVity was far and away the better choice based on the broad scope of functionality that would address all of their requirements. Native backup and DR were key criteria for their solution, and one of the primary drivers for their adoption of OmniCube. "SimpliVity turned out to be significantly different, not just a better version of what we already have," said the CIO. "This is a really creative solution that gives us everything we needed within our budget. We'd never have been able to achieve the results we get with OmniCube using the traditional vendors."

• iON123, an IT services provider and value-added reseller located in Jacksonville, Florida, uses OmniCube in its production environment to reduce datacenter footprint, streamline operations and to improve backup and disaster recovery. Based on its success with OmniCube, iON123 became a SimpliVity reseller.

Stu Miniman, Wikibon Principal Research Contributor commented, "Users are increasingly turning to converged infrastructure architectures to increase agility and lower operational expenses. By baking in advanced services such as data protection and disaster recovery, SimpliVity's OmniCube reduces the complexity of the IT stack."

"Our customers continually explain to us and their peers that the driving interest in OmniCube is the broad scope of native functionality that is well integrated and synthesized into the single product," explained Doron Kempel, Founder and CEO of SimpliVity. "By delivering all key data center infrastructure functions with a single, efficient shared resource pool, we enable 3X cost savings while bringing enterprise grade functionality to customers around the world. Customers increasingly recognize the need to address all infrastructure functions as a whole, rather than continuing to struggle with the complexity of the status quo. Essentially, they are demanding Convergence 3.0, and the extraordinary success and demand for OmniCube that SimpliVity has seen in 2013 demonstrates that."

About OmniCube

SimpliVity's OmniCube^TM takes infrastructure convergence a quantum leap forward over existing products - to Convergence 3.0 -- by utilizing standard x86 servers to deliver a complete single shared resource pool that provides a very broad scope of infrastructure functionality and displaces up to 12 disparate products. Each OmniCube system is an autonomous Lego-like building block that delivers compute, hypervisor, storage, networking, cache-accelerated performance, native VM-centric backup, WAN optimization, replication for disaster recovery, and public cloud integration. OmniCube goes beyond single data center convergence to deliver a global federated architecture, allowing systems around the globe to efficiently share and move data and operators to efficiently manage all global systems and the associated data from a single management point. OmniCube's underlying technology, OmniStack™, is SimpliVity's highly innovative and novel data architecture that combines inline, accelerated deduplication, compression and optimization of all data, once and forever, with a global federated framework that the IT team can use to manage globally distributed nodes as a single, unified infrastructure system.

Resources:

• SimpliVity OmniCube Case Studies Page
• OmniCube Overview

About SimpliVity Corporation

SimpliVity, the Data Virtualization Company, was established with the mission of simplifying IT by delivering a new data architecture that powers an assimilated infrastructure platform. SimpliVity's OmniCube™ utilizes standard x86 base systems to converge server and storage functionality, along with significant advanced functionality that today is delivered by numerous disparate appliances-all at a fraction of cost and with extreme reduction in complexity. OmniCube goes further than infrastructure convergence to enable a global network of systems for managing and protecting the virtual machines and their data. OmniCube systems are deployed in a network of two or more, creating an OmniCube Global Federation, which provides efficient data movement, resource sharing, and scalability.

SimpliVity's solutions and professional services are available through its reseller and partner channels along with sales, service and customer support located worldwide. Information on SimpliVity Corporation is available at www.simplivity.com, tel: +1-508.310.0132 or e-mail at [email protected].

Note to Editors: SimpliVity, SimpliVity's logo, the Data Virtualization Company, OmniCube and OmniStack are trademarks of SimpliVity Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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