I can help with some of your questions. The Simplivity model was meant to scale via new nodes and not by upgrading existing nodes. The Simplivity card does all of the inline/real-time storage processing for de-dupe and compression it is a critical piece of their system as it offloads that work from the systems CPUs. vCenter is not going anywhere. As with any new product, a choice had to be made as to which hypervisor that would be used for the system. VMWare is a market leader so it was an easy choice for Simplivity.
OmniStack Accelerator Card (OAC). Purpose-built PCIe based Accelerator card designed by SimpliVity. Bandwidth (10Gbps), low latency (failure.
I can help with some of your questions. The Simplivity model was meant to scale via new nodes and not by upgrading existing nodes. The Simplivity card does all of the inline/real-time storage processing for de-dupe and compression it is a critical piece of their system as it offloads that work from the systems CPUs. vCenter is not going anywhere. As with any new product, a choice had to be made as to which hypervisor that would be used for the system. VMWare is a market leader so it was an easy choice for Simplivity.