Punchy SimpliVity wins a Global 50 financial services customer

Hyper-converged systems supplier SimpliVity has won a Global 50 customer, a financial services one.

This company has been in existence for more than 100 years. It hopes to reduce its IT total cost of ownership by an astonishing $100m over five years.

We don't know who it is but we're thinking it is a financial services powerhouse on the scale of Allianz.

It needed to modernize its IT fleet, so to speak, and went through a nine month evaluation of SimpliVity use at three of its global data centres in Asia, the USA and Europe. There were six of these centres but they are being condensed to just three.

They will run 4,000 virtual machines (VMs) on 120 Cico UCS servet-based systems which are distributed, unevenly, across the three data centres. The applications include Oracle, SQL, Exchange,VDI, some Web and proprietary apps. These are tier one applications: "not kids' stuff", as SimpliVity Chairman and CEO Doron Kempel describes it.

Everything in them will be run on SimpliVity, with no other arrays at all.

SimpliVity was introduced to this customer by a value-added reseller. Initially the customer wanted SimpliVity to run on HPE servers, it having some HPE 3PAR arrays. But SimpliVity is certified on Cisco, Dell and Lenovo servers, and a server is pretty much a server is a commodity. So the choice was switched to UCS.

HPE is out and management is through UCS Director.

Each data centre has disaster recovery (DR) provided by one of the other data centres. A data centre and its DR site is in a fully active state with failover should one data centre fail.

The company believes that data protection, which is included in SimpliVity's offering, is superior to having separate data protection products. Its energy cost, meaning electricity supply, is also going to be lower by choosing SimpliVity kit.

Virtual machines can be moved and deployed to run in the optimum data centres quite easily. SimpliVity's DR software backs up a VM to another data centre. If that VM is then moved to the second data centre only the changed blocks need to move which shortens the migration time significantly.

Kempel said the assumption has been that hyper-converged systems are for small and medium business and branch offices. This win is a clear tier 1 enterprise case. "It is a proof point showing SimpliVity is good for high-end enterprises. This is a pivotal moment for us."

Cisco's HyperFlex announcement, based on Springpath hyper-converged software, hasn't dented SimpliVity's UCS sales, by the way. They have increased 30 per cent since them, from a base of 1,000 systems.

With other enterprise customers, such as TravelPort, SimpliVity would have us understand that it and the hyper-converged movement is an existential threat to Dell/EMC, HPE and NetApp.

There are just two leading hyper-converged players; Nutanix and SimpliVity, and four system suppliers that need to be firmly aboard the hyper-converged train. That means there are four potential buyers for Nutanix and SimpliVity; Cisco, Dell, HPE and NetApp. Let the bidding wars commence. ®