Jesse St. Laurent, SimpliVity, at VTUG Winter Warmer 2015 with Stu Miniman @theCUBE #VTUG Approaching infrastructure in terms of its building blocks raises several major challenges for practitioners, not the least of which is accommodating change. Managing the individual pieces is already difficult enough as it is, but when it comes to moving something around or replacing it, the amount of time and effort needed to keep everything in balance increases exponentially. That becomes a major issue in large-scale enterprise environments that combine an array of different components from almost as many vendors. “One of the problems when you have such a big stack is adding devices,” SimpliVity Inc. product strategy veep Jesse St. Laurent explained on theCUBE at the VTUG meet-up earlier this month. “There’s this endless cycle of you add another storage device, then you’re out of balance on another device and have to add another one of that, upgrade this. SimpliVity looks to simplify that.” The company offers to move up the level of abstraction with its converged appliances, which bundle servers and storage into a tightly-integrated chassis that layers management software over the top. According to St. Laurent, that does away with the Jenga effect of implementing changes in traditional environments. The fact that every component from hardware to administrative services is included in SimpliVity’s laptop-sized appliance also gives it the advantage of a wide range of use cases. St. Laurent said that the cost of upgrading an existing server farm is often justification enough to replace an existing environment with converged appliances from his company. SimpliVity also says its product is perfect for modernizing disaster recovery. The typical organization has information from the main environment supporting its everyday operations backed up to a secondary location so that business can continue in the event of an outage. Setting up the process has traditionally required administrators to manually establish the connection points between the two deployments, which St. Laurent said not only takes up a tremendous amount of effort but makes change management more difficult. “If a change happened on one side or the other, there was a huge amount of business risk, planning and work that went into it,” he detailed, “and that often takes a huge amount of money to pay to a consultant who would do the work. In our environment, you simply define where and how to send the virtual machine.” SimpliVity has also bundled data replication capabilities into its management stack, which reduces the size of the workload that has to travel across the network when backing up information. Most of its competitors have similar value propositions, but St. Laurent claimed that his company approaches the problem differently. Although compression and deduplication capabilities have become commonplace, shrinking data is not always practical. The process takes up a great deal of processing power at the expense of the main workload, which is not something an organization can often afford with mission-critical applications. SimpliVity claims to circumvent the issue with a specialized accelerator card built into each one of its appliances that offloads the work from the main processors, leaving performance unaffected. “That enables the platform to run all your business applications, do all the things you bought it to do, without the user having to think about it. In the end of the day, if the user doesn’t have to make a decision – if it just works – that’s mission accomplished,” St. Laurent summarized.