Amid rumours that Cisco may be acquiring a hyper-convergence vendor, Simplivity, a key player in the red-hot hyper-convergence market, has said that it is not for sale.
“We’re not selling the company because we think there’s a great opportunity in the hyper-convergence market,” Simplivity chief executive officer Doron Kempel told Techgoondu in an exclusive interview.
“But we’re happy to work closely with Cisco because we have a superior technology,” he says, adding that the company, which has raised US$276 million so far, will “probably go public at some point in time”.
Last year, Simplivity partnered with Cisco to offer its OmniStack software and hardware accelerator card with Cisco UCS rack mount servers, allowing it to expand into new markets.
2014 was a record-breaking year for Simplivity, which saw nearly 500 per cent increase in sales and customer acquisitions over 2013.
It also grew to more than 400 employees worldwide, with more than 270 per cent year-on-year-growth. Today, 51 per cent of its revenue comes from outside the United States.
A large part of Simplivity’s success may be attributed to its focus on helping enterprises improve the efficiency of data management processes such as data backup and deduplication.
“In convergence 1.0, players such as VCE take servers, storage and VMware (virtualisation software), and put them into a container with a management layer on top,” Kempel says. “We think it’s a wonderful thing because it created this whole industry.”
“But you’ll still need to buy other products that are not part of VCE, like DataDomain, Riverbed and backup products,” he says.
In convergence 2.0, Kempel says companies like Nutanix and VMware (through its Evo Rail appliance) have combined storage with servers.
“But the Intel processors in the servers are dedicated to the applications,” Kempel says. “So, if you’re going to put in storage capabilities, the storage would need attention from the processors.
“And if you’re also going to do deduplication and compression of data, you’re going to have unpredictable performance because you’re taking computing cycles away from the applications.”
While this may be acceptable when running VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) and less important applications, Kempel says it will not be the case for mission-critical apps that are vital to an organisation.
To nip the problem in the bud, Kempel says Simplivity developed a hardware accelerator card with its own processor that takes care of storage and data related requirements such as data compression and deduplication.
He calls this ‘convergence 3.0’, where efficiency extends from servers and storage to data, with all data being deduplicated, compressed and optimised once — before it’s written to disk — and remaining in that state throughout its lifecycle.
This is done through OmniStack’s data virtualisation platform, which includes native data protection capabilities that perform VM-level backup and bandwidth-efficient replication to further simplify IT and operations.
Simplivity also developed its own file system, as there are no existing file systems that support rapid data compression and deduplication with low latency, according to Kempel. “It’s not just about servers and storage — it’s also about data efficiency and data protection.”
According to IDC, market awareness of hyper-converged systems reached new heights last year, due in large part to a flurry of product announcements, new market entrants and venture capital funding.
By the end of 2014, nearly two dozen companies had entered, or announced their intention to enter, the hyper-converged systems market.
This has set the stage for strong market growth this year, when global revenue from hyper-converged systems is expected to reach US$807 million, up 116.2 per cent over 2014.
