IBM jumps on the hyper-converged bandwagon
Last week’s announcements further show that HCI has gone mainstream.
One of the world’s largest and most storied legacy players, IBM, said it is investing $1 billion in SDS. This BusinessInsider article, In another brilliant move, IBM just budgeted $1 billion to take down EMC, discusses IBM’s strategy. It also features Nutanix as the “poster child for this new market”.
In the introductory article to this blog site, I described how seven legacy datacenter manufacturers control $56 billion of the annual $73 billion server and storage market. Here’s an updated status of their participation in the HCI space:
HP: StorVirtual & EVO:Rail
IBM: Announced HCI strategy
Dell: Dell XC (Nutanix OEM) & EVO:Rail
Oracle:
Hitachi: EVO:Rail
Cisco: Teamed with Maxta & Simplivity. Investment in stratoscale.
EMC: VSPEX Blue & ScaleIO
NetApp: ON TAP EVO:Rail
As IBM’s server business transitions to Lenovo, the Chinese giant should replace IBM on the list. Lenovo hasn’t yet announced an HCI offering – but undoubtedly it will.
Springpath
Springpath, another HCI start-up, came out of stealth mode last week. Formerly known as Storvisor, Springpath was founded by a couple of VMware veterans (maybe they decided to grab the new name since VMware spun off SpringSource to Pivotal?).
Springpath has $34 Million in funding from Sequoia, Redpoint and other VCs. VMware’s Duncan Epping wrote a complimentary piece about the company on Yellow-Bricks, though Forbes was somewhat critical. I do think that their subscription model is intriguing.
FalconStor
Last week also saw an erroneous headline claiming that small but 15-year old IT company, FalconStor, announced a hyper-converged solution. The new FreeStor is actually a “horizontal converged data services platform”, but it just goes to show how hyper-convergence has become so top-of mind.
Other HCI Players
In addition to industry leader Nutanix and the large legacy players and their partners mentioned above, the other manufacturers who have, or who have announced, HCI solutions include:
Atlantis Computing
Citrix Sanbolic (recent acquisition)
DataCore
Huawei (partnered with DataCore)
NIMBOXX
Pivot3
Scale Computing
StorMagic
VMware VSAN
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