– Authors:

Tyler BoucherSimpliVity Corp.

Sachin MullickSimpliVity Corp.

Executive summary

SimpliVity addresses a problem that is all too common in IT - the cost and complexity of legacy infrastructure - but SimpliVity’s approach to alleviat-ing these challenges is anything but common. SimpliVity’s Intel-based hyperconverged infrastructure, consoli-dates and radically simplifies all IT infrastructure and data services below the hypervisor leading to transforma-tional business benefits.

SimpliVity is a leader in hypercon-verged infrastructure for the software-defined data center providing the enterprise-class resiliency, protection, and performance that IT requires and the cloud economics that businesses demand.

SimpliVity’s hyperconverged solu-tions are built on enterprise-class server platforms with the Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v3 Processor family that delivers a superb combination of performance, flexibility, and efficiency. SimpliVity product lineup also utilizes Intel® Solid State Drive Data Center family and Intel® Ethernet Converged Network Adaptors in several of its configurations.

Dramatic Efficiency & Cost Savings:

• SimpliVity delivers 3.7X total cost of ownership (TCO) savings with 224%return on investment and 6.6-month payback period.1

• SimpliVity is 22%-49% more cost-effective than Amazon Web Services.2

• One-third of customers achieve data efficiency ratios over 100:1 while increasing application performance.3

• Over 57% of customers reduced RPOs from days/hours to minutes.3

• Over 40% of customers reduced RTOs from days/hours to minutes.

Sources: Forrester Research, Evaluator Group, & TechValidate.

solution BriefSimpliVity OmniStack™ Hyperconverged Infrastructure Intel® Xeon® ProcessorSoftware Defined Storage

SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure Delivers Cloud Economics, EnterpriseCapabilities & Data Efficiency

Table of Contents

Hyperconvergence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

SimpliVity OmniStack Differentiation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

The Data Virtualization Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

The OmniStack Accelerator Card . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Business Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Hyperconvergence

Today, SimpliVity is revolutionizing IT systems for hundreds of enterprises around the world. The challenges of the legacy IT stack - cost and complexity - are a result result of investments in multiple point solutions such as traditional storage for capacity, servers for compute power, flash arrays for performance, deduplica-tion appliances to reduce storage, WAN optimization to reduce data sent over the network, data protection tools, and others. Not only is this expensive to purchase, deploy, and manage, but the care and feeding of this infrastructure leaves many IT teams stuck - focused on urgent tasks with little time for initiatives that are strate-gic to the business.

Organizations are adopting hyperconverged infrastructure to address these chal-lenges - but not all converged solutions are created equal. Unlike first-generation converged solutions offering pre-configured “solutions” based on a reference architecture, or second-generation solutions that only combined servers, network-ing, and storage, SimpliVity converges all IT infrastructure and services below the hypervisor onto highly efficient and scalable industry-standard servers using powerful Intel processors.

SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure

SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure is a scalable, modular, 2U building block of Intel resources that offers all the functionality of traditional IT infrastruc-ture in one device, with a unified administrative interface.

SimpliVity assimilates eight to twelve core data center functions including the hypervisor, compute, storage, network switching, backup, replication, cloud gate-way, caching, WAN optimization, real-time deduplication, and more. Designed to work with any hypervisor, OS visualization technology, management tool, Intel platform server, and any cloud provider, SimpliVity provides a single, shared

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resource pool across the entire IT stack. SimpliVity elimi-nates point products and inefficient siloed IT architectures, improves IT service agility, and mitigates risk.

SimpliVity’s product portfolio covers a wide range of use cases and hyperconvergence market drivers for business ranging from small single site environments to large-scale multi-site enterprises and the Global 2000. SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure is currently delivered on three best-of-breed servers with Intel CPUs – the OmniCube™, OmniStack™ Solution with Lenovo* System x3650M5, and OmniStack Solution with Cisco* UCS C240M4. This provides customers with the flexibility, freedom, and choice of indus-try-standard servers leveraging powerful Intel processors.

SimpliVity OmniStack™ Differentiation

SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure, delivered as OmniStack, embodies a dramatic improvement over other forms of convergence and hyperconvergence. The foundation of SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure is the OmniS-tack Data Virtualization Platform software and its OmniStack Accelerator Card.

The Data Virtualization Platform™ is SimpliVity’s data archi-tecture, a globally-aware file system with data optimization techniques that enables a single, shared, scalable compute and storage resource pool across multiple sites, and provides highly-efficient data storage, management, and mobility.

Figure 1: Survey data from SimiliVity customers, conducted by Techvalidate3

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The OmniStack Accelerator Card is a purpose-built PCIe card that offloads OmniStack’s global inline deduplication, compression, and optimization processes to ensure primary Intel CPU resources are available to serve business applica-tions. As a result, SimpliVity customers see an average of 40:1 data efficiency ratios with a dramatic increase in applica-tion performance.4

The OmniStack Data Virtualization Platform delivers three key innovations – data efficiency, global unified management, and built-in data protection – while ensuring desired cloud-like economics.

• Accelerated Data Efficiency

The data problem is not new, there is not only a data growth issue but perhaps more important, a performance/ IO issue. The one-to-one relationship between a physical server and storage shifts to a many-to-one relationship between virtual machines and a single storage controller. Multiplexing the different IO streams of multiple work-loads by the hypervisor creates random IO streams that must compete for resources. This increases IOPS required to service the virtual workloads. To address performance issues, more disk spindles can be added. However, this also increases capacity. This over-provisioning leads to a higher cost per gigabyte of storage allocated to every virtual machine.

SimpliVity and Intel address the data problem with Accel-erated Data Efficiency. SimpliVity performs inline data deduplication, compression, and optimization on all data at inception, across all phases of the data lifecycle, all handled with fine granularity of just 4KB-8KB. This dramat-ically reducing required storage capacity and network bandwidth while accelerating performance. SimpliVity’s data efficiency functions result in less data being trans-ferred and stored, and eliminates redundant reads/writes, improving performance. As a result, on average, SimpliV-ity customers’ storage is 40 times more efficient with an increase in application performance.

SimpliVity is optimized to take advantage of Intel’s x86 architecture, SimpliVity’s deep technological founda-tion allows the core Intel CPU to be reserved for the high performance of business applications as SimpliVity’s accelerated data efficiency functions are offloading onto SimpliVity’s own PCIe card. This ensures that the power of Intel is being leveraged for the most critical needs – running business applications.

• Global Unified Management

Virtual machines are portable. However, virtual machines are tied to the datastore in the virtualization domain, which is tied to siloed physical storage. This can limit the mobil-

ity of the virtual machine. To complicate matters further, instead of managing from a virtual machine point of view, IT is managing the virtualized workload’s storage from the point of view of the storage system: LUNs (or NFS mounts), volumes, RAID groups (or aggregates) and physical disks. SimpliVity’s breakthrough is aligning the data to the virtual machine, globally. Locking data into its underlying hard-ware infrastructure is now a thing of the past. Now, data is just as mobile as the virtual machine itself. This is the true essence of Software-Defined Data Center.

SimpliVity’s VM-centric approach to management elimi-nates manually intensive, error-prone administrative tasks.

• Built-in Data Protection

SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure includes built-in data protection functionality, enabling business continu-ity and disaster recovery for critical applications and data, while eliminating the need for special-purpose backup and recovery products. SimpliVity’s inherent data efficiencies minimize disk I/O and WAN traffic, reducing backup and restore windows from hours to minutes. This eliminates the need for complex and costly add-on backup software and hardware. Back ups can be done locally or stored at a remote site—including the public cloud.

Business Value

• Agility: SimpliVity offers scale-on-demand infrastructure consisting of a unified stack running on an Intel shared resource pool. By establishing scalable test/dev. and production environments quickly and easily, and rapidly provisioning and deploying applications, IT can reduce cycle time and get to market faster.

• Minimize Risk: SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure includes native data protection that eliminates the need for traditional backup software and hardware, and enables disaster recovery. Backup policies and operations occur at the VM-level, allowing protection strategies to be custom-ized for each workload. Native deduplication, compression and optimization of production data before it is first writ-ten to disk create capacity, bandwidth and performance efficiencies that are carried through to backup and replica-tion operations.

• Improve Operational Efficiency: With operational costs more often contributing to the lion’s share of an IT expenses, the savings impact of SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure can be significant. SimpliVity automates and streamlines operations to reduce manual processes, and optimizes floor space, power, cooling, bandwidth, and other fixed costs. It helps break down infrastructure silos, reducing interoperability issues. SimpliVity also reduces the need for specialized training.

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• Reduce Capital Expenses: SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure reduces the number of discrete compo-nents required to deliver data center services, dramatically cutting costs. It optimizes storage capacity, network band-width, and IO to create additional capital and operational expense savings. SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure also reduces the labor-intensive activities associated with deploying and maintaining infrastructure supporting virtu-alized applications. SimpliVity helps IT leaders make the shift from reactive management to innovating. SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure delivers significant capital and operational cost savings, which can fund innovation initiatives in IT to support and grow the business.

Disclaimers1 see http://demand.simplivity.com/forrester-tei-study for cost analyses and configurations

2 system = Standard SimpliVity OmniCube CN-3400 machines in a 3-6 node cluster, with VDI as a workload, and evaluations done by the Evaluator Group. See: http://demand.simplivity.com/report-tco-comparisons-with-aws for more.

3 see https://www.techvalidate.com/product-research/simplivity-omnicube/charts for published results of SimpliVity customer surveys.

4 system configuration = OmniStack with agent deployed in cluster for datacenter hyperconverged usage. Test data comes from standard OmniStack software, and is auto-generated by each instance. See: https://www.simplivity.com/blog/2015/03/true-hyperconvergence-ticker-explained/ for more.

Intel technologies’ features and benefits depend on system configuration and may require enabled hardware, software or service activation. Performance varies depending on system con-figuration. No computer system can be absolutely secure. Check with your system manufacturer or retailer or learn more at intel.com/storage.

Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors and products. Performance tests, such as SYSmark and Mobile-Mark, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products. Configuration: see footnotes above.

For more information go to http://www.intel.com/performance. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. © 2016 Intel Corporation © 2016 SimpliVity All Rights Reserved. SimpliVity, the SimpliVity logo, OmniCube, OmniStack, and Data Virtualization Platform are trademarks of SimpliVity Corporation in the U.S. and/or

other countries*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

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Summary

SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure is revolution-izing the data center, virtualizing data and assimilating all IT infrastructure and services below the hypervisor into build-ing blocks with Intel CPUs. SimpliVity delivers the best of both worlds: the enterprise-class performance, protection, and resiliency that IT organizations require, with the cloud economics businesses demand. SimpliVity provides the customer with choice and freedom to choose any server or OS virtualization technology, any management tool, any x86 server, and any cloud provider.

To learn more, schedule a demo: http://demand.simplivity.com/schedule-an-omni-stack-demo

To learn more about how Intel is advancing data center stor-age, visit www.intel.com/storage