back to article Surprise! HPE says nothing about ProLiant server hardware for SimpliVity OmniCubes

HPE has closed its SimpliVity acquisition and publicised software porting and migration plans but hasn't said anything about SimpliVity hardware moving to a ProLiant server base. The second-largest hyperconverged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) startup was bought for $650m, and so SimpliVity's hardware added to HPE's two-horse …

  1. Crazy Operations Guy

    "It will be interesting to see what HPE does with the OmniCube data reduction FPGA, with the potential there for a combined 3PAR+OmniCube ASIC."

    Why not just cram it into their RAID adapters? But then they couldn't charge ridiculous premiums on special-purpose drive arrays. The only thing I see that Simplivity actually does is some fancy de-duplication and compression bits. And all that savings is pissed away with the mark-up on the hardware and the licensing bullshit.

    For the last few years, I've forgone expensive arrays and went with some cheap SuperMicro 24-bay boxes, filled it with high speed / low capacity 120-GB SSDs, throw in a couple of LSI / Avago -4i4e cards with the battery backup and SSD cache modules turned on, and then stuck a 90-bay/4u JBOD array onto the back filled with 4 TB SATA disks. Comes out a hell of a lot cheaper than the Simplivity boxes I tried out, even performs better than them too. Also tested them against a bunch of the other storage boxes as well, like NetApp's and EMC's offerings. And with recent price drops, I've been able to use 240 GB SSDs and 8 TB spinning rust for a total of 4 TB of ridiculously fast cache and 600 TB of still pretty damn fast storage (Hard drives may be slow, but when you have 90 or them, it all adds up pretty quickly). At this point, the bottleneck is the PCIe bus coming off the processors...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @COG

      I think rigs like yours are exactly what they are afraid of. Buying the second largest vendor in the space for $650 million is a tell too. That isn't a big business. They paid a premium so it wasn't even worth that much really. Between the cloud and DIY the major hardware vendors are going to have a rough time if they can't convince buyers that all this HC stuff is really worth it. And what's next - hyper, hyper converged? Super duper pooper scooper hyper converged? So, I can muck around with all the high-priced, lock-in crap or go cloud and DIY for much, much cheaper. hmmmm ...

      1. Crazy Operations Guy

        Re: @COG

        And that is why I wonder why they aren't just building standard boxes with the FPGA / ASIC built into the storage controller. It's much easier to design and build storage solution in that case. It'd be much easier for them to just take an off-the-shelf DL380, pop the fancy RAID card into it, and sell it as a high-end storage system. Heck, then they could market the controller as an add-on for all the existing boxes they sell. Throw a 10/40-Gig NIC onto the card for replication, then you could cross-connect a pair of systems together and have a pretty resilient cluster with minimal effort.

        For extra points, add a pair of M.2 or SD-card slots to the RAID controller to hold the OS.

        They could cut down drastically on producing multiple chassis types as well as needed inventory.

        But then it wouldn't be HP. Once the kings of the datacenter, now gasping for life as they drown under their acquisitions and mismanagement. Their downfall really started when they started making dozens and dozens of different products, with very little differentiating them, and never making any of them -good-. This applies to everything they made from laptop, desktop and printers; to their servers and networking devices; and even up to their blade servers and mainframes. Now with storage, they have their own MSA/VSA-series stuff, 3PAR, Simplivity, and then there are the ProLiant storage systems, which are just DL380s with an MSA-80 glued to the front...

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: @COG

          Even with a fancy raid card how does a single server become a high end storage system, you need multiples and software to pull it altogether and the software is the bit that takes a lot of time and testing especially in the enterprise market.

          What you're suggesting is actually what's happening under the covers, both 3PAR and Simplivity run x86 with some custom silicon, in 3PAR's case the system is designed for storage density or scalability neither of which a stock DL380 could really provide cost effectively. In the hyperconverged space this is of course a good fit and if you can offload some of the heavy lifting to a relatively low cost PCI-E card then why not it makes development simpler and time to market faster.

          HP inc has desktop, laptop and printers, HP didn't really have mainframes but servers proliants, blades and networking are doing well as is storage. As to the storage products I think you may be confusing individual storage components (commodity) with storage actual solutions (enterprise).

    2. baspax

      yes but

      Organizations might not want to depend on YOU doing all the architecture, support, and ongoing validation. Sure, I can buy a car put together by my trusty mechanic. But if he gets run over by a bus I am out of luck.

      As to FPGA, that's complete dead end. Next Intel CPU generation Purley Skylake has FPGA built in. No need to put stuff in the controller or elsewhere. It's already in every x86 socket ...

  2. ManMountain1

    Strange title to this article given that the first thing I saw when I went to the Simplivity site is that it's now available on HPE Servers!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Yeah it's here https://www.simplivity.com/omnistack-hpe-proliant/ but as per the article you're unlikely to get it on the floor as an single sku appliance before May.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Chris...what makes you say that about StoreVirtual?

    All of HPE's Hyper Converged appliances are based on StoreVirtual VSA, even the newest ones.

    Go here and click over to 'specifications' and you'll find it in there.

    https://www.hpe.com/us/en/product-catalog/convergedsystems/hyper-converged/pip.specifications.hyper-converged-380.1008591219.html

    My take is that HPE bought Simplivity for it's customer base and that HPE have no intention of ever putting that goofy FPGA card into their servers. The SimpliVity name may continue but the whole concept of FPGA based 'Hardware-Defined-Software-Defined-Storage' was doomed from the beginning.

    Meanwhile, StoreVirtual VSA is still the only good SDS technology HPE owns. They may de-emphasize the name, but it's not going anywhere and will continue to be at the core of HPE's HCI appliances. And remember, it was the StoreVirtual VSA appliances that drove HP to #1 in Gartners latest MQ.

    Cheers

  4. wollo

    1 FGPA card = SPOF

    1. superscouser

      >1 FGPA card = SPOF

      Not really ... the OmniStack uses virtual NFS so if the OAC/FPGA fails a second node with OAC/FPGA can respond to the VM request.

    2. Stand001

      1 Motherboard= SPOF...

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