Ask HN: What Is HPE's Simplivity?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22260787

by rckoepke • 6 years ago

1 1 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/integrated-systems/simplivity.html

Having some trouble understanding what the technology stack and value proposition is, exactly.

I understand so far that it apparently includes a portfolio of rackmounted servers which are ideal for virtualized systems, and maybe there's some custom silicon/hardware accelerators included that do depuplication/compression/etc to offload that stuff from the CPU cluster.

Are services included? Subscriptions? or just servers? I presume this lineup competes with Dell's blade portfolio?

Many thanks for the help figuring out the technical / business landscape of this brand.

Ascetik• 6 years ago

I use it exclusively in my environment. Most people don't understand what exactly it does, but it's not like your traditional SAN/Host configuration.

Not sure what you mean by services included, there is an exclusive simplivity support team. They will have a blade offering at the end of the year based on my meeting with HPE Simplivity back in December.

It's somewhat difficult to explain, but it's essentially deduplicated and compressed bit level server hardware that shares storage in a vSAN like configuration but it replicates blocks.

So say you have 10 RHEL VM's, with only 100mb of unique data varying across the 10 VMs. Since those VM's all match in terms of block data, that storage space is not taken up, only the unique data is. This block level matching means you have a super high efficiency in terms of storage use. So even though all those VM's look like they take up say 10gb of storage each, in reality those 10 VM's combined are only using 11gb of data because that first 10gb is static read blocks that are essentially co-shared by the VM's since it's the same and the other 10x100mb is unique. I hope that makes sense. This also enables super, super fast backup and recovery. It is amazing technology and faster than any traditional backup system I've ever used. I can restore a VM back to say 12AM yesterday in as little as 3 seconds and auto power it back on.

I would really encourage you to speak with a Sales Engineer as they can explain it more detail.

I currently have 6 hosts in my environment and it's amazing if you want tons and tons of VM's that do not host a lot of unique data. If you have large data-sets of unique data it is still really useful, but I would just encourage people who have those large datasets to look into purchasing a traditional SAN. But in terms of efficiency, nothing compares. It is amazing.

Ask HN: What Is HPE's Simplivity?

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