HPE SimpliVity enhancements deliver improved agility for datacenters at the edge

New software and hardware updates for HPE SimpliVity solutions powered by Intel® provide IT organizations with additional scale, efficiency, and flexibility. These hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) enhancements are especially powerful for organizations with multiple sites.

One of the coolest things about being part of the Agile engineering team for HPE SimpliVity is being able to deliver incremental innovation to customers with every product update. While today’s announcement benefits all HPE hyperconvergence customers, the availability of new HPE SimpliVity software version 3.7.7 will be of special interest to IT organizations with datacenters at the edge.

Agility at the Edge

According to Gartner, data is growing rapidly at the edge. “By 2022, more than 50% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud.”* IT organizations need the agility to grow quickly and update their technology simply, whether that means non-disruptively adding more nodes to an HCI cluster or more storage capacity to existing HCI nodes. Key HPE SimpliVity enhancements announced today provide organizations with higher scalability, improved operational efficiency, and increased flexibility.

Higher scalability with up to 16 nodes per cluster

With the recent release of HPE SimpliVity software version 3.7.7, HPE SimpliVity 380 and HPE SimpliVity 2600 customers can now expand their environments to accommodate up to 16 nodes in one cluster. This feature lets datacenters expand their existing cluster sizes by 2X and federation sizes by 3X, simplifying the infrastructure and setting it up for intelligent software-defined networking. (HPE SimpliVity with Composable Fabric delivers network awareness that can automatically discover HCI clusters, VMs, and nodes, and then automatically provision resources.)

HPE SimpliVity customers such as Alterra Mountain Resorts, steel manufacturer USS-POSCO, and energy giant Petrobas Oil & Gashave nodes that span multiple locations. Businesses like these can readily take advantage of the higher scalability, simplified management, and efficiency that are at the heart of today’s announcement.

Powerful software improvements 

Software improvements in HPE SimpliVity software release 3.7.7  speed deployment, increase operational efficiency, and put more power in the hands of IT administrators.

• Expanded hypervisor support: HPE SimpliVity platforms support the latest VMware hypervisor release of vSphere and vCenter 6.7 U1. This new software release provides VM administrators with improved user experience, enterprise-like features, and security hardening capabilities.
• Enhanced rapid deployment and upgrades: Support for parallel node deployment and upgrades saves an administrator a lot of time by providing the ability to deploy a 16 node cluster in less than an hour or upgrade ESXi, OVC and nodes at the same time with zero touch.

HPE SimpliVity 3.7.7 software enables parallel deployment and upgrades for hosts

• Support for vSphere Web Client (HTML 5): For customers who manage their HPE SimpliVity in vCenter via a web browser, HPE now provides access to most features in Web Client using the HTML5 vSphere plug-in. This is an exciting step from HPE, empowering VM administrators and IT staff to increase their operational efficiency.

HPE SimpliVity HTML5 Web Client Home Page

In addition to these enhancements, as part of the Agile process, HPE is continuously improving customer experience in Microsoft Hyper-V environments. HPE SimpliVity 3.7.7 includes several deployment manager enhacements and support for Windows 2008 and 2012 Active Directory Domain services.

Get an overview of the technology that helped HPE SimpliVity earn CRN Product of the Year awards for two years in a row. Download the Gorilla Guide to Hyperconverged Infrastructure.