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New-gen converged data center software provider SimpliVity on Aug. 19 launched the second version of its OmniCube IT infrastructure system, which runs on standard x86-based servers.
An OmniCube is a 2U rack-mounted system that aggregates the functions of server, storage and networking into a much smaller footprint. In addition, OmniCube features advanced functionality that otherwise is only delivered through numerous point products, such as native VM-level backup, WAN optimization, bandwidth-efficient replication for disaster recovery (DR), cache accelerated performance and cloud integration.
OmniStack, the secret sauce within OmniCube, provides what the company claims is the world’s only globally federated and hyper-converged infrastructure platform, SimpliVity CEO Doron Kempel told eWEEK.
“An OmniCube is a data center building block that scales up in the data center to meet the performance and capacity requirements of any environment, and scales out globally to enable IT teams to move and protect the virtual machines and their data across an OmniCube federation,” Kempel said.
New feature and functionality enhancements to OmniStack include the following:
—OmniCube Cloud: Improvements have been made to the native cloud connectivity feature delivered that allows the customer to connect an Amazon “Cloud Node” to an OmniCube federation, providing an efficient target for disaster recovery for virtual machines within the primary data centers. Updates include improvements to performance, usability, user-tunable parameters (including enhanced scheduling and bandwidth throttling) and improved bandwidth utilization.
—OmniStack Accelerator 2: The OmniStack Accelerator is SimpliVity’s specially designed PCIe card that allows OmniCube to deliver inline deduplication and compression on all data as it hits the system while maintaining high performance.
—OmniCube Software 2.1: This includes improvements to usability and serviceability, along with several customer-requested features or certifications—such as support for VMware’s vSphere API for Array Integration (VAAI).
SimpliVity also introduced two new OmniCube models to augment its current CN-3000: CN-2000, optimized for smaller IT environments or remote office environments; and CN-5000, optimized for ultra-high performance application environments.
OmniStack powers all three models. Each one provides the same core feature set with the only difference occurring in the hardware specifications: CPU cores, memory, solid-state drive (SSD) and hard-disk drive (HDD) capacities.
“ESG Lab’s hands-on testing of an OmniCube Global Federation has confirmed that SimpliVity has taken a novel and differentiable approach to solving the complexity, performance and availability problems associated with delivering enterprise-class IT services,” said analyst and Enterprise Strategy Group Vice President Brian Garrett.
“Our testing not only confirmed that OmniCube is extremely simple to deploy and manage, but that it’s amazingly cost-effective as it improves data protection and scales to meet the performance needs of the business. Excellent performance scalability was measured as OmniCubes were added to a Global Federation in a virtual server environment with a mix of common IT business application workloads and impressive performance of more than 1 million IOs per second was achieved with 40 OmniCubes.”
Detailed specifications and data sheets are available here.