SoftIron Limited, a private cloud solution vendor, recently announced VM2, a software-only version of HyperCloud. With this latest product offering, the company is directly targeting disaffected VMware customers with a solution that is arguably closer to the public cloud than any other platform on the market today.
Background
SoftIron Limited is a UK-based company founded in 2012 by Phil Straw, Dr Norman Fraser and Mark Chen. The company has developed a range of task-specific hardware solutions for private data centres that focus on an optimised hardware and software stack. Early products included networking equipment and storage solutions, the latter being based on open-source Ceph and running on bespoke servers with Arm processors.
HyperCloud
In September 2022, SoftIron introduced HyperCloud, a custom, turnkey hardware and software platform for building private clouds. The solution consists of multiple servers that deliver either storage or computing resources, connected by networking infrastructure, which orchestrates the management of the server components. The software layer enables users to create virtual instances that are deployed in a multi-tenant environment with full self-service.
SoftIron designs, builds, and manufactures every aspect of the hardware, down to the BMC (baseboard management controller) on each server. With control over the entire infrastructure, SoftIron can optimise for performance, cost, and power consumption.
Operationally, HyperCloud is more easily managed than traditional hyper-converged infrastructure, due to the simplicity of design and full control over the hardware. In September 2023, SoftIron became an authorised CVE numbering authority, enabling the company to be fully transparent with software vulnerabilities and exposures.
HyperCloud 2.0
In January 2024, SoftIron launched HyperCloud 2.0. The latest update provides an upgraded GUI and dashboard with complete control over all aspects of the hardware. In addition, the new release enhanced support for firmware upgrades and management across the hardware infrastructure. At the software layer, SoftIron introduced a VMware vSphere migration tool, a CSI driver for Kubernetes and updates to the integral API.
VM2
In March 2024, SoftIron announced VM2, a software-only version of the HyperCloud platform that can be deployed on commodity hardware. VM2 is clearly targeted at potential customers who may be considering moving away from VMware but have significant unamortised investment in server hardware and storage. The solution is licensed by subscription, with support from SoftIron partners.
The Architect’s View®
From the initial inception of the company, SoftIron took an alternative approach to on-premises infrastructure. The early solutions for storage and networking (HyperDrive and HyperSwitch, respectively) used Arm and AMD processors to optimise the cost and power demands of the hardware while delivering equivalent performance to mainstream solutions (such as x86 HCI). The individual solutions have evolved into HyperCloud, a fully-integrated private cloud solution.
The unique advantage of the SoftIron solutions is the task-specific design of both hardware and software. By optimising each component of the stack, the maintenance and overhead for customers are reduced (and almost eliminated), while the hardware becomes commodity enough to be simply swapped in and out in response to demand or ongoing upgrades.
However, bringing things together is the software which offers much more than a server virtualisation platform. HyperCloud is multi-tenant, enables users to template and build solutions in a self-service fashion, with processes that are aligned to the public cloud consumption model.
Today, SoftIron is very much focused on addressing the typical computing requirements of a broad spectrum of businesses. The design of HyperCloud enables the solution to be deployed at the edge or in core data centres.
The move to bespoke hardware may be a challenge for some potential customers. For those with a desire to move away from VMware vSphere, for example, there could be an existing investment in hardware that must be addressed. This is where VM2 comes in. The software-only option provides a bridgehead for customers to try the private cloud capabilities of HyperCloud, with a choice to move to SoftIron hardware in the future.
We envisage scenarios where technology teams take existing hardware and build out test VM2 environments to evaluate and integrate the solution into existing processes and practices. As part of this process, the TCO of existing and bespoke hardware can be evaluated to determine the right option moving forward.
Is HyperCloud for everyone? At this point in the company evolution there are some drawbacks to the custom design. Today, customers are limited by the node/server choices made available by SoftIron. There’s no option to add (for example) GPUs for analytics. Although this configuration could be supported by VM2, we don’t believe there is support within the HyperCloud software for virtualised GPU devices.
Of course, it’s early days in the development of HyperCloud, and customer demand will drive new products and solutions. SoftIron can bring many alternative hardware platforms to market, ranging from very lightweight solutions based on (for example) the Intel NUC format, all the way to highly optimised compute servers based on either x86, Arm or even RISC-V processors. The core value is, of course, the software linking all of this together.
You can learn more about task-specific design with our free eBook, sponsored by SoftIron. Learn more about HyperCloud in this first podcast recorded with SoftIron and more about task-specific software in the second podcast listed below.
- Hybrid Cloud 010 – Engineering the Private Cloud with SoftIron HyperCloud
- #223 – Task Specific Software-Defined Storage
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