Email delivery: Hate phishing emails? You'll love DMARC

SimpliVity has miniaturised and maximised its all-singing, all-dancing converged OmniCube IT systems with entry-level and high-performance versions as well as strengthening the original, now mid-range box.

SimpliVity ships its 2U OmniCube – which is not a cube but an oblong box if we're going to be pedantic – a converged server, storage and networking system. It can be federated to provide scale-out resources to run virtual machines in a data centre, replacing individual servers, storage arrays and network products. It is built from OmniStack technology which has three top-level components:

• Virtual Resource Assimilator for the pooling and sharing of OmniCube x86-based hardware.
• Data Virtualization Engine for inline deduplication, compression, and optimisation of all data within an OmniCube Federation. The OmniStack Accelerator is a PCIe card enabling OmniCube to deliver inline deduplication and compression of data as it enters the system.
• Global Federated Architecture to enable an intelligent network of geographically distributed, collaborative systems.

SimpliVity says it has a customer base well into the double-digits, and shipments approaching 100 systems. It originally expected to reach 100 shipped systems by the end of 2013 and should now significantly exceed that number.

The original single CN-3000 OmniCube is now joined by a smaller CN-2000, for SMBs and remote/branch offices and larger CN-5000, which it says is "optimised for ultra-high performance application environments".

The CN-3000 gets two options for CPU core counts and larger capacity SSD drives

SimpliVity OmniCube range - click for larger display

The CN-2000 has reduced storage and compute features compared to the CN-3000, while to CN-5000 replaces the 8 x 3TB drives of the CN-3000 with 20 small form factor 900GB disk drives to up the spindle count fivefold and increase disk IO.

Overall CN-5000 raw capacity is less, at 21.2TB, than the boosted CN-3000's 27.2TB. Access the product datasheets here (PDFs).

The OmniStack environment gets new features as well:

• OmniCube Cloud now lets a customer can connect an Amazon “Cloud Node” to the OmniCube Federation, providing a target for DR for VMs within the primary data centres. Updates include significant improvements to performance, usability, enhanced user-tunable parameters (including enhanced scheduling and bandwidth throttling), and improved bandwidth utilisation.
• OmniStack Accelerator 2 adds more performance, increases overall system reliability, and increases the number of potential platforms that OmniStack can support over time.
• OmniCube Software 2.1 "includes significant improvements to usability, serviceability, and … support for VMware’s VAAI."
• Certification for VDI support from Citrix for Xen Desktop and "extensive 3rd party application testing.

ESG Lab VP Brian Garrett said in a prepared quote: "Performance of more than a million IOs per second was achieved with 40 OmniCubes.”

OmniCubes are similar to Nutanix' NX products. From the storage point of view both are hybrid flash + hard disk drive arrays and share features with fellow hybrid array vendors Nimble Storage, Tegile and Tintri. However Nutanix and SimpliVity both provide, in effect, in-array computing too.

SimpliVity says it converges storage, compute and networking, but we don't see anything other than Ethernet ports. There's no mention of network switching inside the box, in the way that Skyera does it.

There is no detailed information on generation two OmniCube availability and pricing available yet. ®

5 ways to reduce advertising network latency