Jesse St. Laurent - VP Product Strategy at SimplivityOne of the most fashionable words in the IT field in this period is certainly convergence, but it's hard to believe that just the word itself or the idea is enough to define every solution of this kind as innovative.

During our visit at VMworld in Barcelona we interviewd Jesse St. Laurent, Simplivity VP Product Strategy, and it's not a case that he spoke about even 3 possible levels of convergence.

• Convergence 1.0, in which the virtual datacenter systems are simply integrated. This solution is developed by some companies in a 8-month time span.
• Convergence 2.0, in which convergence is effective albeit being partial. In this paradigm many components of the datacenter are usually excluded, like backup, SSD acceleration, WAN optimization, Data management. This kind of convergence is -according to Simplivity- proposed by many startups with a development time of 19 months.

Simplivity solution instead is complete because it includes all the cited components and is therefore proposed as Convergence 3.0, where everything is put in a single “stack”. The development time of a similar solution to Simplivity is 43 months, well beyond the time that a startup has to account for to an investment fund.
Simplivity solutions is distributed both as a hardware and as a software to install on certified hardware (at the moment there's an agreement with Lenovo and Cisco in the United States) or third part. The former implementation is called OmniStack, the latter OmniCube.

UPDATE: the day after our interview, Simplivity has made an announcement which couldn't be part of the article because of an Embargo protection. It's about the release of new certified results on platform performances in a VDI environment. Simplivity puts itself as an extremely performant solution for this kind of use: 1.000 logins in 1.000 seconds, linear scalability with 1.000 deployed desktops in almost 70 minutes and a superior data protection with integrated backup and recovery features are the results achieved.

If you're interested in the convergence theme, then don't miss the next issue of GURU advisor.. we'll talk about VMware Virtual SAN 6.1.