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In this episode I’m with Jesse St. Laurent (VP of product strategy at Simplivity) and we talk about:
– An update about the company
– KVM and Openstack integration
– Cisco UCS Director integration
Here the transcript of the show
Enrico: Hi everyone and welcome to a new episode of Juku Beats. Today I’m with Jesse St Laurent, VP of Product Strategy at Simplivity. Hi Jesse, how are you?
Jesse: Hi Enrico, thanks for having us.
Enrico: Thank you for joining the podcast. I have these three questions for you, you know how the podcast works. I will go straight to the questions. First of all, Simplivity is a well known brand in the hyper-convergence market. Can you give us an update about the company and the product?
Jesse: Sure. Simplivity, as you mentioned obviously, a well-known brand in the hyper-convergence space and really continuing tremendous growth globally so in terms of expansion we excited that our support center in Cork Island continues to expand and we crossed recently over 500 folks, 550 actually, globally. So we were at Cicso Live last week, we announced support for UCS Director at Cisco Live, had a tremendous show. I think the week before we announced support for KVM and OpenStack within our technology as well, so continuing to expand both on the technology side as well as adding folks globally as an organization at Simplivity.
Enrico: Good. Let us focus on the KVM and OpenStack announcement. From my point of view, the problem with KVM is that it acts in many different [inaudible 00:01:32] distribution and also for OpenStack is even worse, probably. What kind of support are you going to provide to end user and what is your role in the KVM/OpenStack communities.
Jesse: We agree completely which is KVM and even more so OpenStack are incredibly complicated and one of the things, if you look at the beginning of any Simplivity presentation, one of the first things we always say is it’s really about simplifying IT and if you take something as complicated as OpenStack, if it takes a computer science degree to install and manage your infrastructure then likely you’ve got something that’s too complicated in terms of your operational efficiency.
Our goal is to provide a simple turnkey solution to that. Our KVM/OpenStack solution … And we try to separate those to things, right? Because obviously KVM and OpenStack are commonly linked in the market but they’re two very different technologies. Ours is deployed very much like a traditional VM, we’re based OmniCube, it’s a turnkey appliance that comes ready to go so on the OpenStack side we’ve done integration with KVM, we’ve done integration with all the Simplivity technology.
All the things that our customers expect from a simplicity perspective around your back up and cloning and policy and all that stuff, is built right into the OpenStack interface so we’ve extended the drivers around nova and cinder and made those available but it’s what the customer gets from us is really a turnkey system that allows them to just deploy it and start running apps within the environment.
Enrico: This is sound really interesting but you have also mentioned another announcement last week at Cisco Live about UCS Director and I know that Cisco is an important partner for you. What does it mean for your customers in terms of integration, what is it and how it works?
Jesse: As a company we always try to make sure we’re listening to what our customers are asking for and if you rewind back to when we initially release the OmniStack support on the Cisco platform, it was really driven by requests from customers and requests by our partners. There’s a tremendous amount of excitement in the market around the UCS technology and customers wanted to bring Simplivity into that environment so that was what drove our initial move into the UCS space and UCS Director’s really just continuing that journey so as a platform we try to make sure that we, as much as possible, blend into the customer’s environment.
If we can allow them to manage their infrastructure through the same operational processes that they leverage today, whether that’s V-Center, whether that’s UCS Director or whether that’s a tool like OpenStack, the goal is to be able to do that so what specifically what we announced about UCS Director was support for not only the automation and orchestration, the work flows, the things like that, but also the day to day management. Taking backups, doing restores, managing the interactive processes of an IT administrator within the environment are all part of that release.
The core focus there again come back to simplicity. From an operational perspective we’re not orchestrating things like a 47-step process to move a virtual machine from one data center to another, one of our objectives is to raise those abstraction levels up higher. Somebody who’s in an operations organization has everything they need to, in one step, move a virtual machine from one data center to another as opposed to a lot of complicated steps.
Enrico: Thank you very much again for joining the podcast. Just one more question. Where we can found you on Twitter … Where we can find Simplivity on the Internet?
Jesse: Sure, you can always go to simplivity.com, you can find Simplivity on Twitter @simplivitycorp or you can find me, @JesseStLaurent on Twitter as well.
Enrico: Thank you very much.
Jesse: Thanks, Enrico.
Enrico:Bye.
