Tighter integration of tech processes has been a major cause of change in the technology business landscape, leading to the practice of hyper-convergence. Under the hyper-convergence model, compute, storage, networking and other technologies are packaged together in one box supported by a single vendor. This dramatically shrinks a company’s operations footprint and speeds development times.

To open a window on the world of hyper-convergence, Stu Miniman of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, sat down with Brian Knudtson, technical marketing manager at SimpliVity Corp., at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2016 conference.

A single platform for solutions

The discussion started with an overview of the benefits of hyper-convergence and SimpliVity. Knudtson pointed out that SimpliVity is a single system, which saves time and money because it removes the need for specialists to manage the different aspects of compute, storage and the rest.

Smaller customers, he said, tend to sign on to use SimpliVity as the core of their systems, while in the higher market, things become application-driven. These larger customers tend to use the system as a point solution, usually growing their investment over time.

Many customers, he said, see the efficiencies of hyper-convergence and invest accordingly in their operations hardware.

Accelerating refresh cycles

Technology is changing more quickly than ever. A company that wants to keep up must adapt and adopt the latest and greatest. Given this reality, infrastructure refresh cycles have been shrinking. Knudtson mentioned his company worked around a target refresh window of about three years for infrastructure investments. In his opinion, the real situation wasn’t so much that refresh cycles were shortening, but rather that modular systems have brought companies many more options to right-size their infrastructure to their current needs.

Finally, the subject moved to what SimpliVity was focusing on for the future. Knudtson said that customers want to know about the mobility of data. Moving data about was a prime concern and a path for future development.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VTUG Winter Warmer 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE