Hyperconverged systems are all the rage right now, creating a hot sector in the world of IT. And the competition is heating up with entrants coming from traditional storage and hardware vendors to new startups with platforms designed from the ground up.
Revenue from hyperconverged systems sales grew 78.1% year over year during the second quarter of 2018, generating $1.5 billion worth of sales according to research data compiled by analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC). This amounted to 41.2% of the total converged systems market.
What is Hyperconvergence
Hyperconvergence refers to platform offerings that are made up of a software-centric design that tightly integrates compute, storage and virtualization resources into a single system. The technology is based on software-defined storage, software-defined computing, and commodity hardware that is managed as a single system through a common, unified tool set. Hyperconverged systems deliver their main value through software tools, often leveraging commoditized underlying hardware. Hyperconverged systems can be expanded through the addition of nodes to the base unit. Most hyperconverged systems require a minimum of three hardware nodes in order to provide high availability. And a grouping of such nodes is known as a cluster.
Selecting a Provider
With such a growing list of players in this market space, it can become confusing to figure out which vendor or which technology is right for any organization or use case. That’s where the folks at WhatMatrix come into play. They are an independent technology comparison and analysis site that has just recently announced the publication of its second SDS/HCI Landscape analysis report. Over and above providing a snapshot of the current landscape of the burgeoning SDS/HCI market, the latest report includes new use case analysis highlighting the top performers dependent upon specific areas of expertise, such as Data Services, Storage and Server support and Management.
And with a refreshing twist, WhatMatrix is making these detailed findings in its landscape report free to vendors and readers alike, in an easily consumable report format.
Comparison
In its latest incarnation, WhatMatrix compares 10 hyperconverged infrastructure vendors and 12 products, and they’ve evaluated over 115 check-points.
“The overall trend is clear: as SDS & HCI architectures continue to address critical pain-points, their popularity has now reached a point of mainstream adoption across the globe,” says WhatMatrix Category Consultant, Herman Rutten. “At the same time small startups and large vendors alike are actively investing in advancing the technology further, making it an innovative and extremely agile industry segment, with new architectures and products emerging rapidly.”
In this second edition of the WhatMatrix SDS/HCI landscape report, they scored and ranked suppliers according to seven criteria: Design and Deploy, Workload Support, Server Support, Storage Support, Data Availability, Data Services, and Management. All of which is detailed and broken down within the report.
But in a quick snapshot, the WhatMatrix report tallied an official score for each of the identified suppliers and products, and came up with an overall total percentage ranking, which follows (higher % is better):
- Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform – 87.4%
- DataCore SANsymphony – 83.3%
- VMware VSAN – 76.6%
- Datrium DVX – 75.7%
- Pivot3 Acuity – 73.0%
- Cisco Hyperflex – 71.6%
- Dell EMC VxRail – 71.6%
- HPE SimpliVity 380 – 71.2%
- NetApp HCI – 70.3%
- Microsoft S2D Datacenter – 68.5%
- Dell EMC VxFlex OS – 60.8%
- HPE StoreVirtual VSA – 59.5%
Beyond the rankings, the report also identified the latest key trends:
- Meshed architectures
- NVMe in hybrid and all-flash compositions
- Erasure Coding without compromise
- Native end-to-end encryption
Of course the continuous stream of new product releases also means features and their evaluations are constantly changing.
“Once you’ve identified qualified candidates, we then advise to use our website to compare the latest evaluations of those candidates side by side, over the latest feature set,” states Rutten. “You can further refine your comparison with use cases – either those predefined by us or ones you create yourself – ensuring you can rely on the most current analysis possible to find the right product, with the right features, for your organization.”
Download the free landscape report, but don’t stop there. Make sure to also check out their most up-to-date technical online comparison at their Website.
