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Hewlett Packard Enterprise is continuing to keep a focus on the network edge and remote offices with the rollout this week of the SimpliVity 2600, a highly dense hyperconverged system offering that the company said will fit well in space-constrained environments.
The 2U (3.5-inch) SimpliVity 2600 can work with such applications as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for data centers where space is at a premium and with internet of things deployments where compute and storage resources are needed at the network edge in such places as manufacturing floors, smart cities and oil rigs. Company officials said the system is the first “software-defined” system in the SimpliVity family, enabling the speed and density needed.
The system expands HPE’s hyperconverged line, which also includes the SimpliVity 380.
“To respond faster to the demands of digital transformation, organizations must deploy software-defined technology and solutions capable of delivering business outcomes at cloud speed,” Thomas Goepel, director of product management for HPE’s hyperconverged portfolio, wrote in a post on the company’s blog. “This solution is ideal for organizations with limited data center space or expensive colocation sites that need dense compute with moderate storage.”
HPE has been aggressive in building out its product portfolios for edge computing, which was a major focus of the company’s Discover 2018 show in June. During the event, HPE officials unveiled pre-validated system architectures for running unmodified enterprise software—such as Microsoft’s SQL Server and Azure cloud services, SAP Hana in-memory offerings and Citrix’s XenApp and XenDesktop—on the vendor’s Edgeline EL1000 and E4000 converged servers.
Also at Discover, CEO Antonio Neri announced that HPE will invest $4 billion over the next four years to develop edge technologies and services, adding that the edge “is where you manufacture your products, where your employees work every day. The edge is everywhere technology gets put into action and I believe the edge is the next big opportunity for all of us.”
According to Gartner analysts, 50 percent of enterprise data will be created and processed outside of traditional data centers or the cloud by 2022, a jump from about 10 percent in 2017. The hyperconverged infrastructure market also is expected to continue to grow rapidly. Global revenue for such systems—which include tightly integrated compute and storage resources—rose in the first quarter 76.3 percent over the same period last year, to $1.2 billion, according to IDC analysts.
According to IDC’s numbers, HPE is tied with Cisco Systems for third in the worldwide hyperconverged space with 5 percent of market share, trailing Dell EMC and Nutanix.
HPE’s hyperconverged portfolio is based on technology acquired when the company bought software-defined storage (SDN) vendor SimpliVity for $650 million. During the Discover show, HPE officials said they planned to incorporate networking technology from Plexxi—which the company bought in May—into the hyperconverged lineup.
PE also has another avenue into edge computing through its Aruba wireless networking business. At the show, Aruba officials introduced such technologies as NetInsight, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to monitor mobile and IoT devices.
According to the vendor, the SimpliVity 2600 combines infrastructure and advanced data services for virtualized workloads into a building block that provides server, storage and storage networking services as well as other functions to improve performance, efficiency, management and security of the workloads.
The system is powered by Intel’s “Skylake” Xeon Scalable Processors and offers up to 768GB of memory and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking. The 2600 includes hot-pluggable SSD storage and redundant power supplies, and eight nodes can be used in a cluster and federation support is available for up to 32 nodes. In addition, it runs VMware’s vSphere server virtualization software and HPE’s SimpliVity management plugin for VMware vCenter.
