Roundtable: Understanding the Benefits of SimpliVity

04/01/2023

Every organisation is attempting to deal with growing complexity in their infrastructure environment to deal with the rapid growth of data. To find out why HPE SimpliVity could be the ideal infrastructure solution for reducing costs, complexity, and risks, we spoke to an HPE expert as well as two of our customers from both the enterprise and education worlds:

  • HPE Hyperconverged Specialist – Brad Morrison
  • Energy Power Systems Australia (EPSA) IT Manager – Jason Snuggs
  • St Johns Regional College IT Manager – Brian Griffith

What’s the biggest driver for choosing hyperconverged infrastructure?

Brad – HPE: From a customer perspective, we know they’re looking for simplicity in a solution. So they’re looking at reducing the amount of complexity, as well as the costs, time, and resources that it takes to manage a traditional I.T. infrastructure stack.

SimpliVity offers a simple format where you can log in and manage everything from backups, to compute and storage – the whole thing. The other part that’s unique to SimpliVity is having data protection built into the solution.

Jason – EPSA: We had an aggressive business growth strategy planned, so we needed the capability and capacity within our infrastructure to grow with our business. We also identified a need for an improved backup and disaster recovery solution, as we were still adding new data centre nodes as we grew.

Brian – St Johns: I had noticed the difficulties caused by new types of unstructured data moving throughout the school’s environment, particularly with duplicated image and video files. We were exploring the opportunity to solve our data storage issues, while updating our backup and disaster recovery solution to lower our risk profile.

How does SimpliVity enable you to lower your risk profile?

Brad – HPE: Your ability to recover and restore information in the event of a data breach or another disruptive incident is essential. SimpliVity’s built-in backup and data protection capability means it will take less than one minute to complete a local backup or local restore of a 1 TB virtual machine.

This built-in VM-centric backup coupled with in-line deduplication enables organisations to achieve 90% capacity savings across storage and backup combined when compared to traditional solutions.

Jason – EPSA: When we consider the huge risks we face from ransomware and other attacks, having such an affordable, fast, and effective backup solution built into our infrastructure is a huge advantage.

Brian – St Johns: While lowering costs and complexity is a key factor in choosing SimpliVity, the built-in ability to lower our risk was another attractive benefit.

How does SimpliVity enable organisations to reduce the complexity of data management?

Brad – HPE: Deduplication reduces disk workload, replication bandwidth, and storage capacity by eliminating redundant data. This delivers a lightweight, mobile data structure that solves the complexity crisis by addressing the root cause.

Combined with compression, which reduces the size of a given data set into a more condensed format, these technologies can be used to reduce the data footprint by 90% when compared to traditional three tier infrastructure.

Jason – EPSA: Honeylight were fantastic in showcasing how these capabilities worked in real time through another SimpliVity client, and once we knew how quickly it could create virtual machines on the fly we were sold.

Brian – St Johns: We were immediately pleased we no longer had to deal with the problem of continually managing storage space. The SimpliVity infrastructure is now used daily by all staff and students, but our school’s data growth is predictable and manageable due to the deduplication the solution provides.

What role does Infosight play in helping SimpliVity customers to manage their infrastructure?

Brad – HPE: InfoSight is an AI platform from HPE that predicts and prevents problems before they arise across your infrastructure. It collects telemetry data from your infrastructure and combines this with telemetry data from the entire SimpliVity customer base worldwide to make predictions and suggestions.

Infosight can also open support cases automatically, while lowering storage operational expenses, and monitoring your data center infrastructure 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Brian – St Johns: Most importantly, SimpliVity and Infosight enable our team to focus on the service and support our school needs – rather than having to worry about server and SAN break fix, or migration of data from one silo to another.

Jason – EPSA: Given our resource and time constraints, the Infosight inclusion within the SimpliVity implementation proved to be the smart solution for our ongoing capacity growth and infrastructure management challenges.

What makes SimpliVity so valuable for education customers?

Brad – HPE: Education customers that we’ve worked with in the past have had a lot to do with quite a small amount of resources. So taking that complexity away from the day to day management of what they’re doing, and putting it into an easy to use, simple box is what’s resonating so well with schools. With the data protection component of SimpliVity it’s built in as well, so it makes a huge difference for them because they’re not having to worry about backup software and retention policies.

Brian – St Johns: Our backup and disaster recovery processes are now almost instant since implementing SimpliVity. This gives us peace of mind that students and staff will experience minimal downtime in the event of any disruption, with recovery times near zero. We can also manage our monthly costs through HP Finance, which frees up capital to be used for other projects.

How important is it to have an experienced partner like Honeylight to help you implement SimpliVity in your organisation?

Brad – HPE: Having the right partner that understands your technology environment and your organisation’s needs is paramount. This ensures you can get those HPE backed guarantees of 90% capacity savings and lightning fast local backups of 60 seconds or less, as well as the many other SimpliVity guarantees.

For adopting a hybrid cloud model, using a partner like Honeylight is valuable because they can potentially host a SimpliVity node or part of your SimpliVity service in their own datacenter. For example, you might be able to use that hosted SimpliVity service for your backup or disaster recovery, which still ensures you’re able to experience those lightening quick recovery times.

Jason – EPSA: With a small internal infrastructure team, Honeylight enabled us to get the solution up and running fast, and their ongoing support meant we had peace of mind that all of our systems were running at 100%.

Brian – St Johns: Honeylight were excellent because not only are they experienced engineers; they have extensive education experience. So they understand the environment and limitations – and were able to deliver the project on budget and on time.

At Honeylight, we understand the unique challenges that organisations face in modernising their IT landscape. By bringing HPE SimpliVity to your school, powered by Intel® Xeon® Gold processor, we can help you implement this market leading hyperconverged infrastructure platform – enabling you to reduce the time, complexity, and costs of managing your infrastructure environment.

To help you create flexibility with your long-term IT capacity planning, we can also help you take advantage of the HPE GreenLake pay-per-use model to deploy HPE SimpliVity on your terms. Simply start with the capacity you need today and grow with new demand by leveraging active capacity management and variable monthly payments based on metered usage.

Contact us today to begin your journey to hyperconverged infrastructure with HPE SimpliVity.

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