SimpliVity and OmniStack Overview

Jesse St. Laurent, VP of Product Strategy at SimpliVity, introduces the company’s OmniStack technology, emphasizing its vision to transform and simplify IT infrastructure. He begins by contrasting traditional data center stacks with SimpliVity’s approach, which aims to replace conventional components like servers, storage, and networking with standardized x86 systems. This transformation is likened to the operational models of hyperscale data centers like Google and Amazon, but tailored for enterprise environments that rely on off-the-shelf and homegrown applications. These enterprise applications have inherent dependencies on the underlying infrastructure, unlike the custom-built applications of hyperscale data centers that are designed to minimize such dependencies.

St. Laurent explains that SimpliVity’s OmniStack technology integrates various data center functions into a single, scalable 2U building block, simplifying management and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). The technology includes an accelerator card for deduplication, compression, and optimization of data before it is written to disk, ensuring data efficiency across all layers of the stack. This approach eliminates the need for separate data protection and replication solutions, as these functions are built into the OmniStack. The system also supports cloud integration, allowing backups to be sent to AWS, although restoring data still requires an OmniCube.

The presentation highlights the flexibility of SimpliVity’s solution, which can be deployed in both mid-market and enterprise environments. In mid-market scenarios, SimpliVity often replaces core business applications and provides disaster recovery (DR) capabilities that were previously too complex or costly. In enterprise settings, the technology is typically introduced for specific applications or development environments, gradually expanding as users recognize its benefits. The OmniStack can also function as a SAN for existing workloads, providing a pathway for gradual migration to a fully hyperconverged infrastructure. This flexibility, combined with the operational simplicity and efficiency of the OmniStack, positions SimpliVity as a compelling solution for modernizing IT infrastructure.