Nearly two years ago, an SEC filing revealed that a stealthy IT company called SimpliVT had raised $9.2 million in funding.
Today that company, with the slightly changed name of SimpliVity, is officially announcing it has launched. And it has just one, oh, minor goal in mind: to “simplify IT infrastructure,” says CEO Doron Kempel, who founded the company shortly after selling his former company Diligent Technologies to IBM in 2008.
Westborough, MA-based SimpliVity’s basic premise is that many large enterprises are built around 1990s-era back-office technology that was just not built with today’s economy in mind. Developments in mobility, virtualization, and public cloud technologies have forced IT administrators to layer on different pieces of hardware and software, such as WAN optimization, backup and deduplication appliances, SSD arrays, storage caching appliances, and more. The total cost of these components across the hardware and services can run about $400,000, Kempel says.
“We think this is just a bunch of clutter, and our assumption was that it cannot continue,” says Kempel. “We believe this is expensive, inflexible, complex, and completely out of the reach of mid-market customers.”
Instead, SimpliVity wraps the functionality of all those myriad devices into its OmniCube processing and storage device. Kempel says the company designed the device from the ground up with mobility and virtualization in mind, in an effort to eliminate the many, additional pieces of hardware that were added to IT foundations as the landscape evolved. OmniCube begins by deduping (eliminate duplicate copies of files) and compressing data “once and forever,” Kempel says. Because the coarse, clunkier data is stripped down, the system can handle storage needs and Web optimization, with two OmniCubes providing all the functionality that traditional IT stacks do, he says.
“It’s like changing the foundations of a large building,” Kempel says.
The technology was designed with a big distributed-computing focus, by allowing virtual machines to connect to and run the OmniCube systems from “wherever they are in the world,” and connecting the OmniCube with data stored in a public cloud, like Amazon’s, Kempel says. IT managers can
