Stories of cyberattacks targeting billion-dollar companies are common, but small, and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) fall victim to cyber threats even more easily.

SMBs tend to have fewer security solutions in place. Unfortunately, most SMB attacks are only discovered too late — when the damage is irreparable.

At the same time, data storage capacity needs have grown exponentially, and regulatory demands place SMBs under pressure to back up data more frequently, restore it more quickly and ensure that it is secure. Traditional drives have not kept up, creating a disparity between storage capacity and performance.

Find out what HPE SimpliVity can do for your business

Traditional solutions involved either solid-state drives or huge pools of HDDs. Both increase the price of storage dramatically. Companies have often invested in a slew of data storage, efficiency and protection tools with a variety of point technologies bolted on over time to deal with specific problems.

This resulted in many SMBs finding themselves held hostage to a wide range of disparate data storage, management and protection solutions. Disparate IT architectures are notoriously inefficient and cumbersome. They cannot meet the rigid price-performance, scalability and agility needs of today’s data-intensive IT environments.

Enter HPE SimpliVity

In response, HPE introduced the SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure, designed from the ground up to meet the increased efficiency, management and data protection demands of today’s SMBs.

The HPE SimpliVity solution offers scalable, modular resources that supply all the data functionality and features SMBs need in one, simple device. It unites storage, compute and hypervisor as well as real-time deduplication, compression and optimisation, alongside the most comprehensive data management and protection, and disaster recovery capabilities that the industry has to offer.

Where SimpliVity really sets itself apart from the competition, is that it provides a single, shared resource pool across the whole IT stack, removing point products and the unwieldy, ineffective siloed IT architectures of the past. In addition, it provides:

Guaranteed data efficiency
Built-in resiliency with full backup and disaster recovery
Global virtual machine-centric management and mobility

Optimised data efficiency

Of the benefits for SMBs, guaranteed data efficiency is probably the most compelling. HPE SimpliVity drives efficiencies at the point of origin, optimising system resource usage and minimising input/output and network traffic. It also accelerates data clone, backup, restore and mobility operations. It does this by performing inline deduplication, compression and optimisation on all data at inception across all phases of the data life cycle, including primary, backup, WAN and archive as well as in the cloud, using fine data granularity of only 8kB.

Solid data resiliency and protection

Another major SMB benefit of HPE SimpliVity is data protection. It’s common knowledge that maintaining data availability is the most crucial function of any data storage platform. Within the solution’s hyperconverged nodes, data is protected from the loss of a minimum of one physical disk drive. Moreover, all data is also synchronously protected on two local HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged nodes to guard against the loss of either node. Its architecture features built-in VM-centric data protection functionality, removing the need for separate or additional backup and recovery solutions. Similarly, virtual machines can be backed up or recovered in a matter of seconds or minutes rather than the hours or days that legacy data protection solutions took.

Moreover, backup delivers a simple, efficient and flexible way for any SMB to store backup data in the cloud. In essence, it’s a fully cloud-native backup storage target that allows users to back up smoothly to the cloud directly from the solution without changing any existing data protection workflows. Also, backups can be restored on-premises without any egress costs.

Global virtual machine-centric management and mobility

The next major benefit — global virtual machine-centric management and mobility — simplifies the complexities and administrative overheads associated with managing multiple silos of IT infrastructure dispersed across a wide range of data centres. This was one of the main reasons HPE built this hyperconverged solution in the first place. Instead of managing individual silos at the device level, a globally distributed HPE SimpliVity implementation can be managed as a unified system across a slew of sites.

The full system, also known as an HPE SimpliVity Federation, is managed via a single administrative interface and common APIs. Usually, managing a worldwide IT infrastructure needs the tracking and updating of IP addresses to make sure cross-site connectivity is maintained when any device is introduced or upgraded. However, with SimpliVity the need to maintain cross-site IP configurations in any site when adding or removing nodes is eliminated.

HPE has focused on managing data at the most critical level for modern data centres — the virtual machine. A management approach that takes this into account simplifies the monitoring and administration of virtual apps, and concurrently shields administrators from the complexities of the underlying IT infrastructure.