Hewlett Packard Enterprise ( #HPE ) just announced an agreement to acquire #SimpliVity for $650 million in cash. SimpliVity is the No. 2 hyper-converged infrastructure ( #HCI ) vendor, boasting a varied customer base and an excellent product. HPE has repeatedly tried to break into the HCI market, with little success. The news follows months of rumors, but still comes as something of a shock. SimpliVity has been dogged by rumors of acquisitions for years. #Cisco, #Huawei, #Lenovo and #HPE have all featured prominently in various rumours at different times. Additionally, HPE is one of the few major vendors that SimpliVity doesn't currently use in their product lineup. SimpliVity hyper-converged servers are currently available from Cisco, Lenovo, Huawei and Dell. Dell provides the OEM hardware for the SimpliVity branded nodes and also offers a meet-in-the-channel Dell branded solution. Rumors about a Cisco acquisition peaked in 2015 and were followed by Cisco sort-of-but-not-quite-acquiring rival Springpath instead. The Cisco-Springpath tie-up ultimately saw Springpath devote their entire engineering efforts to integrating with Cisco UCS, making them a de facto arm of Cisco. SimpliVity is currently engaged in a patent lawsuit against Springpath. A Feature, Not a Product SimpliVity's unique selling point comes from their unique approach to storage. This makes use of a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware accelerator to provide for real-time data deduplication without impinging upon the host CPU ( SimpliVity's hardware accelerator isn't just an FPGA. There's also flash, RAM and a supercap in there. Useful for not losing data if the power goes out.) SimpliVity's approach to storage also makes them rather efficient in multi-site environments. From a purely technical standpoint, if what you wanted was a basic hyper-converged solution that provided a solid storage layer with great data efficiency, SimpliVity has been unbeatable. Unfortunately, this is where SimpliVity chose to stop. Other hyper-converged vendors -- most notably Nutanix -- figured out some time ago that hyper-convergence is a feature, not a product. The product is a turnkey hybrid cloud. SimpliVity has consistently resisted any notion that it should devote time or effort to such a development, insisting that it would rely on hybrid cloud solutions provided by other vendors. VMware Threatened More specifically, SimpliVity was betting on VMware to pull a hybrid cloud rabbit out of its hat, only to see VMware move from miserable failure to miserable failure in this area. HPE, on the other hand, already has turnkey cloud offerings, notably the "Azure in a can" solutions they've been working on over the past few years. This culminating in their implementation of Microsoft's Azure Stack. If you put SimpliVity's infrastructure expertise together with HPE's Azure Stack knowledge, you get one heck of a product. Instantly, SimpliVity becomes a realistic counter to Nutanix's hybrid cloud ambitions, and a very real threat to VMware. HPE gets to ship more boxes and Microsoft just keeps on winning. They already have the best hybrid cloud solution out there, so anything that makes it better is, at this point, just gravy. It is also worth bearing in mind that SimpliVity's technology has uses to HPE beyond HCI. External storage arrays are a declining market, but adding SimpliVity's dedupe tech to 3PAR might help HPE carve out a slightly larger slice of that shrinking pie. SimpliVity thus represents two birds with one stone for HPE. A bargain at $650M.
https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2017/01/18/the-fallout-from-hpes-acquisition-of-simplivity.aspx?m=1
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