A recent Wikibon customer virtualization survey showed a couple of striking figures. Firstly, the number of respondents with no current plan to adopt a converged infrastructure plan for their organization increased by approximately one percent over last year’s survey. Conversely, those organizations considering adoption of converged infrastructure also fell by approximately one percent over the 35 percent reported last year.

Wikibon’s Stu Miniman today wrote about a new software package that could very well make the decision to adopt infrastructure implementation far easier. In his article, Miniman announced SimpliVity had assimilated a Deep Stack into their converged infrastructure offering.

As Miniman notes, Wikibon predicted converged infrastructure would become the de facto means for the purchase of gear by IT departments back in April 2012. This prediction was arrived at because converged infrastructure has too many benefits when compared to its challenges. Namely, it provides a simplified solution where both deployment and operational efficiency are concerned. And with Miniman’s article, it was announced SimpliVity has updated their currently available solution with deeper offerings.

Prior to today’s announcement, customers shopping for a converged infrastructure stack would receive storage, network, compute and management software. With SimpliVity’s new OmniStack software, a customer will also receive backup/dedupe, WAN optimization, cloud gateway functionality and use of SSD and flash caching. Customers will be able to choose between an OmniCube and OmniStack.

Of course, one major benefit of converged infrastructure is longitudinal scalability. Currently, most IT departments purchase storage as their needs dictate rather than acknowledging the full life-cycle of their virtualized data. SimpliVity and their new architecture is intended to provide multi-box scalability. The expectation is that an initial deployment would consist of 3-4 cubes at a single site with scalability up to 12 cubes at as many as 6 sites. And SimpliVity claims they intend to expand their capabilities so that, in the future, one could operate 512 cubes at 64 sites. And the exciting part for any CIO looking at finally adopting converged infrastructure is that deployment of a base SimpliVity SLA can be achieved for around $27k.

SimpliVity’s OmniStack is the first deep software stack that can support both onsite, service provider or cloud deployments. With this and future advancements in the converged infrastructure market will, most likely, reverse the downward trend noticed in this year’s Wikibon customer virtualization survey. Of course, only time will tell.