Hyperconvergence is the term on everyone’s lips as the benefits that virtualisation has brought to server performance are extended into the realm of storage and networking as well.

Seshni Gafoor, hyperconvergence lead at Axiz, explains that the new world of hyperconvergence benefits the entire data stack.

“The legacy stack would traditionally be the switch, storage, server and WAN optimiser, all of which would be managed separately,” she says. “You would have had to employ different people, all skilled in different areas, to look after the environment.

“With hyperconvergence, you collapse that whole infrastructure into one 2u box. And you can employ one person, skilled in VMware, to manage the whole stack.”

Axiz is leading its hyperconvergence offering with SimpliVity, technology that lets organisations move all of their storage technology into one server, where it is deduplicated, compressed and optimised.

A recent report from ActualTech Media demonstrates that infrastructure adoption is moving beyond single-system use cases to support all IT services and applications, including business and mission-critical, for organisations around the globe. Cost reduction and operational efficiency are the most common reasons why companies opt for hyperconvergence, with a majority of companies having already adopted the technology or planning to do so in the next couple of years.

It’s not surprising that adoption rates are climbing. A Forrester study found that organisations that deployed SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure realised storage efficiencies of 60:1 on average and experienced a payback period of only 6,6 months for their investment.

The study also showed that SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure provides a return on investment (ROI) of 224 % over three years, with a 3,7-times reduction in TCO. It also decreases the data center footprint by 10:1 and storage efficiency by 60:1.

It offers backup management savings of three hours per day and consulting hour savings of 24 hours per week on average as well as a 45% reduction in power consumption. Disaster recovery operations are also improved, along with better application performance.

The good news doesn’t end there: an Evaluator Group study indicates that SimpliVity’s ability to deliver a per-virtual machine (VM) price that rivals even the largest public Cloud providers, with cumulative three-year TCO savings of 22% to 49% compared to AWS.

Hyperconvergence has come a long way in the last couple of years: the initial technology consolidated the server and storage into one system; later it put the two functions on to one box; today all the technologies are in one box that lets the administrator compress and optimise data in the Simplivity server, doing away with the need for optimisation or backup software.

Advanced Technologies currently supports about 46 resellers with SimpliVity technology, but this will undoubtedly grow quickly once HPE’s acquisition of SimpliVity is finalised, probably in October.

The three-man team aims to upskill resellers while helping them with lead generation and closing opportunities. Axiz Advanced Technologies will soon be named as SimpliVity’s only integration-certified distributor in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region.

Current partners tend to be enterprise-level, Gafoor says, but Advanced Technologies aims to develop SME partners as well.

“Hyperconvergence is so new that it’s almost a greenfield opportunity,” she says.

So far, the bulk of the SimpliVity activity has been in South Africa, but the rest of the continent is starting to pick up, Gafoor adds.

 

HPE acquisition

The acquisition will see HPE add SimpliVity’s technology to its hyperconverged portfolio, with pre-installed servers available from this month.

The acquisition provides a number of benefits, including:

Built-in enterprise data protection and resiliency to simplify backup and quickly restore operations;

Enterprise storage utilisation and virtual machine (VM) efficiency to control costs and performance;

Always-on compression and deduplication;

Policy-based VM-centric management to simplify operations and enable data mobility, making development teams and end users more productive; and

The addition of disaster recovery to HPE’s existing hyperconverged use cases such as VM vending, VDI and Enterprise ROBO/LoB.