One of the most interesting, if little-known companies here at VMworld is just emerging from stealth mode with a radical new take on virtual infrastructures. SimpliVity refers to itself as "a provider of simplified IT infrastructure solutions for virtualized environments," but that bland description doesn't begin to tell the real story.
The brand new company's initial product is OmniCube, which also comes with a complex description, i.e. "The world's first truly all-inclusive, assimilated IT infrastructure designed and optimized for the virtual machine environment." One more quote: "OmniCube is a low-cost, ultra-functional , high-performance, automated IT infrastructure platform that empowers a single administrator to manage the infrastructure, exclusively from VMware vCenter."
According to Doron Kempel, chairman, CEO, and mastermind behind SimpliVity, OmniCube is a simple to manage, 2U rack-mounted building block that delivers numerous storage, computing and networking services for virtual environments. According to him, "Two or more OmniCube systems are deployed together to form an OmniCube Global Federation, a massively scaleable pool of shared resources that enables sufficient data movement, extensive scalability, and enterprise-class system availability--all managed globally from a single pane of glass."
Each OmniCube system includes simplified, extensive scale-out, bandwidth, efficient, duplicated and compressed replication, low-cost, easy to manage disaster recovery, and public cloud integration.
Doron says SimpliVity, which has raised $18 million in capital from Accel Partners and Charles River Ventures, is built on a new IT infrastructure stack called OmniStack. OmniStack contains numerous patent-pending innovations and delivers an entirely new and efficient way of managing IT, including storage, managing, protecting and sharing data globally in public clouds. It uses a "novel data architecture" in which data is deduplicated and compressed at inception, "once and forever, at fine-grain 4KB-8KB datasets, across nodes, data centers, geographies and the public cloud."
The OmniCube Accelerator, a PC module responsible for all the intensive algorithm processing, ensures that the deduplication and compression can run inline with no impact on performance. The management and mobility of data in these very small datasets enables the assimilation of OmniCube's core functionality--data mobility, resource sharing, intelligent caching, scalability and high availability--into a single platform.
Thus, Doron claims, OminCube supplants the functionality of numerous traditional independent products with a simple, low-cast, 2U package, resulting in enormous savings in capital costs and operating expenses, while significantly improving the management of the virtual machines and the business applications that depend on them.
Pricing for OmniCube begins at $54,990.