Simplicity may be on the verge of appearing in at least some IT environments, writes Wikibon Analyst Scott Lowe in his second report from the floor of VMworld 2012, “Terminator: The Rise of the (Simple) Machines”. And while simple solutions are always suspect in the complex world if IT technology, in this case, the former CIO says, the solutions may offer real advantages.

Lowe reports on three vendors he found on the floor at VMworld: Nutanix, Pivot3, and Simplivity. All three of these startups go far beyond the computing pod offerings, such as Vblock, from the major traditional vendors, to the point that he describes them as “anti-Vblock”. Rather than stacking discrete pieces – server, storage, and network switch – together, they produce completely unified systems-in-a-box designed ground-up to provide a complete physical infrastructure engineered for simplicity.

This approach does have drawbacks, one of which is that they have limited customization support, although all do provide some options. Another may be price – he reports that they are more expensive than he originally expected. However, all three vendors promise that their systems work out to be less expensive than buying Pods or building custom infrastructure from separate hardware devices. Lowe promises to investigate the price question in more detail after he gets back from the conference and report the findings on Wikibon.org.

On the other hand, he says, these systems do offer advantages in simplicity beyond single SKU ordering. Provisioning becomes a simple question of how many boxes to buy – the units come with everything needed to run complete environments and are designed to plug-and-play with others of their brand, so multiple units can be managed as a single entity on the data center floor. This alone promises significant savings in operations. They are designed from the ground up as infrastructure for virtualized environments; vSphere runs on the same box as the applications rather than on a separate unit. And basically they have fewer moving parts to manage.

Lowe cautions that these products may not be right for highly complex environments. However, he recommends that CIOs that are not faced with unusual, complex demands, and particularly those at SMBs and mid-sized companies and government entities, take a serious look at these new purpose-built converged “infrastructure-in-a-box” products and consider how they can simplify the issues of managing their data centers.

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