SimpliVity Corp. has made two major announcements that will greatly enhance its hyper-converged system capabilities. In addition to the introduction of a powerful new 22TB all-flash appliance offering that will allow the platform to operate with much greater performance and reduced latency, the company also announced RapidDR, which will automate and accelerate off-site disaster recovery.

As part of theCUBE‘s pre-VMworld coverage, Jesse St. Laurent, VP Product Strategy at SimpliVity, sat down with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, in the SiliconANGLE Media Studio in Marlborough, MA, to discuss the company’s new products and why it chose this particular time to offer them.

Why the time was right for all-flash

Some companies offering hyper-converged platforms have been offering all-flash solutions for years, but SimpliVity has waited until now to enter this segment of the marketplace. According to St. Laurent, there are two reasons for this timing. First, SimpliVity is servicing a greater number of big enterprise customers than in the past. These larger companies have a heavier analytics workload, which will greatly benefit from the kind of performance enhancement and low latency all-flash appliances can provide.

In addition, the price of all-flash has decreased drastically over the past year. This has enabled the company to offer the benefits of all-flash to its customers at a much lower price point than was previously available.

“As we do more and more business with large enterprise customers, there’s inevitably applications in the data center that need a higher performance result,” said St. Laurent. “We never wanted to build an all-flash platform to have some offering in the portfolio that looked good in the marketing procedure. We wanted to build it when the economics made sense and it made sense for the customer.”

RapidDR means simpler, faster disaster recovery

SimpliVity has always offered built-in disaster recovery and backup for its hyper-converged products, but traditional disaster recovery methods have always been a highly manual, time-consuming process, requiring extended downtime and expenditures in extra man-hours, as well as specific tools and equipment. RapidDR has taken this long-time product feature to a new level, by automating the entire process and providing a software dashboard the customer can use to implement the recovery and monitor it while it executes, according to St. Laurent.

“RapidDR is really about that recovery time objective for the application, bringing that down to be as fast as we can,” said St. Laurent. “Everybody has had some type of issue. The key is how you can respond to that, and if you can turn it into ‘click-a-button’ and everything comes back up and running, it’s a pretty good day for the operations team.”

Watch the complete interview below:

Photo by SiliconANGLE