DCIG is pleased to announce the availability of its DCIG 2015-16 Hyper-converged Infrastructure Buyer’s Guide that weights, scores and ranks over 100 features from nearly 60 hyper-converged solutions from 17 different providers. Driven by growing corporate requirements to more effectively manage, utilize and scale commodity compute and storage for all types of applications, hyper-converged solutions have emerged as powerful alternative to existing server/SAN and converged infrastructure approaches. Like all previous DCIG Buyer’s Guides, this Buyer’s Guide provides the critical information that organizations need when evaluating hyper-converged infrastructure solutions to create short lists of products that match their specific requirements.
Perhaps one of the most important emerging technology markets in recent years is that of hyper-converged infrastructure. Hyper-converged infrastructure is a software-defined structure that integrates components of compute, storage, networking and virtualization that are delivered on commodity hardware.
The driving force behind the implementation and adoption of hyper-converged infrastructures is largely two-fold: the advent of server virtualization, which has already been going on for the better part of a decade, and the more recent rise of flash memory as a storage media.
As hyper-converged infrastructure solutions evolve, they will potentially include two types of storage: mission-critical and utility. Utility storage accounts for the vast majority of storage consumed in an organization. As such, implementation of a hyper-converged infrastructure could potentially make it the sole supplier of utility storage and supplant existing solutions.
Despite being a relatively new technology, they are already a large number of providers with hyper-converged infrastructure offerings. VMware is currently the largest hypervisor manufacturer in the market with 93 percent of the solutions surveyed by DCIG for this Buyer’s Guide supporting VMware. By way of example, every major server and storage vendor (Cisco, Dell, HP, etc.) has a vSAN Ready configuration or uses VMware as a hypervisor for an EVO:RAIL solution.
While VMware may be the biggest hypervisor manufacturer, there are many more. Linux KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V have been instrumental in the market’s rapid development and maturity. In addition to the vendors already listed, an IDC Marketscape study from December 2014 listed Maxta, Nutanix , Simplivity and Springpath as up-and-coming vendors. These complement solutions from the likes of Cisco, Dell, EMC, and HP that each have their own vSAN Ready and EVO:RAIL configurations.
It is for reasons like these that DCIG is pleased to announce its inaugural 2015-16 Hyper-converged Infrastructure Buyer’s Guide. The top solutions in the DCIG 2015-16 Hyper-converged Infrastructure Buyer’s Guide include (in alphabetical order):
- Cisco UCS vSAN Beginner Pack (High Capacity)
- Cisco UCS vSAN Beginner Pack (Med Capacity)
- IBM vSAN Ready High
- Nutanix NX-1000-Series
- Nutanix NX-3060-G4-Series
- Nutanix NX-3175-G4-Series
- Nutanix NX-6000-Series
- Nutanix NX-7000-Series
- Nutanix NX-8000-Series
- Nutanix NX-9000-Series
- SimpliVity OmniCube CN-2200
- SimpliVity OmniCube CN-3000
- SimpliVity OmniCube CN-5000
- SimpliVity OmniStack with Cisco UCS
- Springpath Data Platform
- SuperMicro vSAN Ready High
- SuperMicro vSAN Ready Medium
In doing its research for this Buyer’s Guide, DCIG uncovered the following statistics about the hyper-converged infrastructure solutions it evaluated:
- All products support 2.5” HDDs
- All models support at least 30TB of capacity with 10 percent of the models scaling to support over 1PB of capacity
- All models scale-out to support at least eight (8) nodes 75 percent of them scaling to support at least 32 nodes in their largest configuration. 15 percent of the models scaled to support 64 or more nodes in their largest configuration.
- All models support VMware ESX as a hypervisor. Linux KVM is the next most commonly supported hypervisor with 26 percent of the models supporting this hypervisor.
- All models support Storage Caching and Thin Provisioning
- 79% provide the option to manage all hyper-converged infrastructure functions within the hypervisor framework
- 77% perform inline block deduplication
- 27% support stretched cluster configurations
As with prior DCIG Buyer’s Guides, this Buyer’s Guide accomplishes the following objectives:
- Provides an objective, third party evaluation of hyper-converged infrastructures that weights and scores their features and then scores the products from an end user’s viewpoint
- Includes recommendations on how to best use this Buyer’s Guide
- Scores and ranks the features on each hyper-converged infrastructure based upon criteria that matter most to end users so they can quickly know which hyper-converged infrastructures are the most appropriate for them to use and under what conditions
- Provides data sheets for 58 hyper-converged infrastructures from 17 different providers so end users can do quick comparisons of the features that are supported and not supported on each product
- Provides insight into the breadth of data protection features offered by each hyper-converged infrastructure solutions and how they are licensed
- Provides insight into the scalability of each hyper-converged infrastructure solution
- Gives any organization the ability to request competitive bids from different providers of hyper-converged infrastructure solutions that more closely reflect “apples-to-apples” comparisons
The DCIG 2015-16 Hyper-converged Infrastructure Buyer’s Guide is available immediately to subscribing users and may be downloaded for no charge with registration by following this link. Note: End-users may receive complimentary access after registering. Storage providers and resellers must pay to subscribe after registering.