**This article got lost in my Drafts folder, but I wanted to make sure to publish as a lot of work went into putting on these events from the Tech Field Day team, and the Vendors**

I had the privilege of attending two Tech Field Day Events while at VMworld 2013 this year. I was able to sit in on discussions for Asigra, and Simplivity.

Asigra

While Asigra is a name I have heard, I admittedly know nothing of their product. In fact, even after the event, I didn’t know much more about the product.  The entire time was used to talk about their licensing methodology – and it was NOT a waste of time.

I found this session quite fascinating, as this is not a licensing module that you see in the backup world.  Asigra is licensed with 2 licenses. One for backup capacity, which is a low fixed cost, and another for data RECOVERED. (not recoverable, but actual data you restore from backup).

From Asigra’s website:

The Asigra Recovery License Model will immediately provide businesses with significant cost savings of 40%, and over time more than 60% as a result of separating backup and recovery license costs.

The software will keep track of the amount of data that has been recovered, and then report on that a couple times a year, which will calculate your recovery license costs.

They have an interesting calculator here to compare with your existing backup software licensing costs.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to go over the product itself, and I have no hands on experience, so I cannot speak to the product features.

Simplivity

The round table discussion with Simplivity was also quite interesting.  This is also a product that I was not familiar with.

Simplivity is a “Hyper-Converged” solution for the datacenter.  The nodes are compute and storage all in one, with 10GB interconnect required.

What I enjoyed most was the push to be “VM Centric.” What does this mean? Well, basically, Simplivity’s approach is that the infrastructure should be there to make your job managing a VM easier, and not manage the entire infrastructure.

Backups, recovery is all VM based, not datastore or lun based. Replication as well.  In fact, when VMs are moving around between the hosts, their storage exports will go with them, ensuring the fastest access to the closest spindles. The ability to move a single VM between datacenters was quite nice, as Simplivity will unregister, move, and register the VM on the other side.

Simplivity boasts simplified management, with the entire Federation of nodes managed inside the vSphere client, and simplified scale out as you mix and match nodes.

Winning a Gold Award at VMworld 2013, Simplivity is a product that I would love to get hands on with.  From their website:

OmniCube is a 2U VM optimized building block that assimilates core storage and server capabilities with the complete set of IT data management functionality required in today’s IT environment. It delivers this functionality at a fraction of the cost of traditional infrastructure products and with an extreme reduction in complexity