vGRID first in NZ to deploy HPE Synergy ‘composable infrastructure’

vGRID, a New Zealand based SaaS and IaaS provider focussed on the small to medium business market, has moved from its datacentre at Waikato Innovation Park into Datacom’s Kapua data centre and has become the first company in New Zealand to deploy HPE’s Synergy product, claimed by HPE to embody a new architecture that it calls ‘composable infrastructure’.

vGRID, a service of Hamilton-based systems integrator LayerX, claims to distinguish itself by offering “reliable unparalleled performance, self-service control panel functionality, and compliance with New Zealand data sovereignty laws.”

According to LayerX CEO, Bruce Trevarthen, the move into the Datacom data centre and the deployment of HPE Synergy are in response to strong demand and unprecedented growth for vGRID services. “We’ve expanded by over 22 percent in the past year and, with a recent deal inked with distributor Exeed, expect even stronger numbers in the year ahead.”

HPE Synergy is claimed to be the first platform architected from the ground up as a composable infrastructure that reduces operational complexity for traditional workloads and increases performance for a new breed of cloud applications and services.

It was announced at HP Discover in London in December 2015 with HPE saying it could enable enterprises to meet the challenges of what Gartner calls ‘bimodal IT’: the need to simultaneously operate traditional, highly structured, slow-moving IT environments with new agile environments that could cater for the business needs created by digital transformation and digital disruption.

Neil MacDonald, vice president and general manager for HPE Synergy and Blade Systems, in an interview with Computerworld Australia in March 2016 said Synergy’s composable infrastructure’ would enable IT to support traditional consumption of IT and respond to the needs of the idea economy in terns of agility and speed of deployment and development and efficiency of management.

He sought to differentiate Synergy and composable infrastructure from other vendors’ hyperconverged offerings, saying these were ideal for fully-virtualised environments but not well suited to bare-metal and containerised environments.

According to vGRID, “As an extensible platform, HPE Synergy uses fluid resource pools, software defined intelligence and a unified API to continually optimise the right mix of traditional and private cloud resources. HPE Synergy easily enables a broad range of applications and operational models such as virtualisation, hybrid cloud, and DevOps.”

Trevarthen said HPE Synergy had been introduced on the back of LayerX’s deployment of HPE 3PAR StoreServ storage, which has underpinned its services since 2011. “This is a tier one all-flash storage array. There are no longer any ‘spinning’ hard disks,” he said. “What that has meant for our customers is dramatically improved performance and far better reliability as the mean time to failure of flash exceeds that of traditional disk by a wide margin.”

He added: “The growth of the vGRID platform means we need to be able to scale rapidly without any impact on reliability and performance for existing or new customers. Kapua data centre, with its independent certification and Datacom’s reputation for operating high availability infrastructure, was identified as the ideal solution.”