Hyperconvergence players

[Author note: This post has been updated and moved to By The Bell http://bythebell.com/2016/01/hyperconverged-players-index.html

While, according to IDC (via SiliconANGLE), “Nutanix generated 52 percent of all global hyperconverged revenue during the first half of 2014”, many other legacy datacenter players and startups have introduced hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) offerings. The following is a list of all the known (to me) hyperconvergence players:

1 Atlantis Computing Atlantis HyperScale
2 Breqwatr All-flash appliance
3 Cisco Investment in Stratoscale. Selling arrangements with Maxta & Simplivity
4 Citrix Sanbolic
5 Datacore Datacore Hyper-Converged Virtual SAN
6 Dell Dell XC (Nutanix OEM) & EVO:Rail
7 EMC VSPEX Blue, ScaleIO & VxRack (VCE)
8 Fujitsu EVO:RAIL
9 Gridstore Private cloud in a box
10 HPE StoreVirtual & EVO:Rail
11 Hitachi Data Systems Unified Compute Platform 1000 for VMware EVO:Rail
12 HTBase HTVCenter
13 Huawei FusionCube
14 Idealstor Idealstor IHS
15 IBM Announced HCI Strategy
16 Lenovo Nutanix OEM. EVO:Rail. Selling arrangements with StorMagic, Maxta and Simplivity
17 Maxta Hyper-Convergence for Open Stack
18 NetApp NetApp Integrated VMware EVO:RAIL Solution
19 NIMBOXX Hyperconverged Infrastructure Solutions
19 NodeWeaver NodeWeaver Appliance Series
20 Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform
21 Pivot3 Enterprise HCI All-Flash Appliance
22 Pure Storage Possible HCI solution coming
23 Rugged Cloud HCI
24 Scale Computing HC3
25 SimpliVity Omnicube (hardware-assisted SDS)
26 Sphere3D V3 VDI
27 Springpath Independent IT Infrastructure
28 Starwind Starwind Hyper-Converged Platform
29 Stratoscale The Data Center Operating System
30 StorMagic SvSAN
31 Supermicro EVO:RAIL
32 VMware EVO: RAIL, VSAN, EVO: RACK
33 Yottabyte yStor
34 ZeroStack ZeroStack Cloud Platform

IBM jumps on the hyper-converged bandwagon

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

Pure Storage

Scale Computing

StorMagic

VMware VSAN