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Nutanix, Simplivity and VMware Lead Software-Defined Storage/Hyperconved Infrastructure Market – WhatMatrix

While Microsoft, Cisco, and HPE lag behind.

WhatMatrix rothenThis report from WhatMatrix Ltd., a crowdsourced consultancy community platform, The SDS/HCI Landscape (Q1/17), Market summary and trends, was written by Herman Rutten, lead category consultant (SDS and HCI), on February 22, 2017.  

 

Key Takeaways
The SDS/HCI market gains momentum. All but a few leading technology vendors have become active participants in the SDS/HCI space, mostly by acquiring promising and proven start-up companies.

SDS/HCI covers a broad innovation spectrum. In the last year improvements have been made in all major functional areas, ranging from the base architecture and data availability to data services and management. Simultaneously, the gap between SDS and HCI solutions is gradually closing.

More use cases for SDS/HCI triggers adoption. Wide adoption of traits like bare-metal host support has increased flexibility, which means that SDS/HCI platforms are no longer confined to just virtualization use cases. Simultaneously customers grow more accustomed to consider SDS/HCI as a serious alternative to traditional storage platforms.

Nutanix, SimpliVity and VMware have the most extensive platforms. At the end of January 2017 Nutanix, SimpliVity and VMware were the front-runners in the SDS/HCI space, closely followed by Atlantis Computing. At that time the SDS/HCI category included 9 different vendors and 12 platforms. The category is likely to expand.

Future Outlook
The customer base of SDS/HCI platforms will start to increase exponentially. Continuing the steep curve upwards, some platforms will assuredly book further success and surpass the 10,000 customer-marker before 2018.

SDS/HCI scope will expand beyond storage. Some vendors have already started in earnest to augment their platform with a full set of private cloud features, and more will follow. As a consequence there will be a growing number of competing platform stacks instead of just platforms.

SDS/HCI gets unified and hybrid. With vendors starting to venture beyond conventional boundaries, for example by adopting file service capabilities, and exploring container technology and deeper public cloud integration, SDS/HCI platforms are set to evolve into unified multi-cloud storage offerings.

Start-up companies will continue to drive smart innovation. With few exceptions smaller companies with an exclusive focus on SDS/HCI are likely to stay ahead of the behemoths when it comes to innovation cycles. This could lead to large vendors opting to focus on quantity instead on quality, or to trim down support.

WhatMatrix Platform
WhatMatrix is the first crowdsourced-powered IT comparison community and is changing the consultancy landscape by providing ‘always online’, curated and absolutely free to access IT comparisons. The structure is unique; utilizing subject matter experts, who conduct their analysis and comparisons and combine it with Open Community Curation for the benefit of the IT community.

WhatMatrix Landscape Reports
WhatMatrix Landscape Reports provide an ‘in-time’ snapshot analysis, complementing the currency and depth of ‘always online’ comparisons with a ‘reflective’ summary of the entire industry segment. Starting with the SDS and HCI Landscape Report, these reports include key industry trends, top-level analysis of vendor capabilities and a forward looking view that enables the reader to make even more informed product purchase decisions.
 
Scope of Report
This report is based on an analysis of the WhatMatrix Category: SDS and HCI

SDS – Software-Defined Storage: With SDS, storage array features are delivered through software approaches instead of storage hardware appliances. SDS promises relative ease, improved scalability as well as cost savings by running highly intelligent storage software on commodity server hardware, using flash drives, spinning disk, and RAM to provide high-performance, fully featured storage for organizations ranging from small organizations to large enterprises and service providers.

HCI – Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: HCI is based on a software-defined approach where storage, compute, networking and virtualization technologies are integrated into a physical appliance that is managed as a single unit. HCI aims to provide administrators with very fast and easy solution deployment as well as a single point of management for all hardware and software components. Unlike converged infrastructure, HCI building blocks typically do not include network switches to connect multiple systems together (scale-out).

SDS/HCI Landscape Overview Q1 2017
Looking back, 2016 was an astonishing year for the SDS/HCI category of the WhatMatrix. The market saw many new platforms being introduced and some of the existing platforms evolve over time. We at WhatMatrix followed suit and expanded our SDS/HCI comparison line-up by adopting 5 new platforms, with an outlook of even more platforms to be added throughout 2017. This means that in the end-of-January timeframe the SDS/HCI category encompassed 9 vendors and 12 platforms. The complete SDS/HCI line-up as of January 2017 is shown in alphabetic order in the table below.

Platforms included in WhatMatrix SDS/HCI category – January 2017
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But how exactly did SDS/HCI fare in the past year and how did it evolve technology-wise? To find out, we took a good final ‘look-back’ at all the data we gathered from January 2016 to January 2017. This effectively means that the content you are about to read primarily covers the vendors and platforms that were included in the line-up at time of publishing.

Vendor Profiles

Atlantis Computing was one of the earlier modern start-ups to focus entirely on SDS. In the first years the company primarily aimed to provide the most performant storage environment to VDIs with the Ilio software-only platform. The secondary use case was to provide a storage performance layer on top of traditional shared storage platforms showing performance issues. The company went for broader use cases and wider customer adoption when it gradually replaced Ilio with the all-new USX platform. VDI roots stayed strong though which led to the introduction of HyperScale, Atlantis’ first combined hardware/software (HCI) offering. In 2016 the firm announced its dedication to the VDI segment and a re-focus of USX towards realizing that goal.

Cisco is a well-known hardware vendor that expanded its network and server portfolio with storage by acquiring Whiptail, a high-performance solid-state platform start-up, late 2013. This first venture however proved less successful than anticipated and Cisco discontinued the Whiptail product line halfway 2015. Late 2015 the company entered a strategic partnership with SDS start-up SpringPath and launched the ensuing HyperFlex hardware/software (HCI) offering in March 2016 that is aimed at a diverse set of datacenter workloads. With strong integration between UCS and SpringPath, Cisco focuses to deliver advanced consolidation of server-, storage- and network infrastructure layers within the boundaries of the modern datacenter.

Dell EMC consists of two established behemoths in the IT infrastructure landscape. Dell is still best known for its server hardware whereas EMC is widely recognized for its storage hardware. Traditionally a traditional shared storage vendor, EMC entered the software-defined arena by acquiring Isilon in 2010 and ScaleIO in 2013. With EMC exclusively focusing on storage hard- and software, Dell ideally complements EMC’s storage software solutions. Sometime after Dell’s acquisition of EMC (including VMware) was announced late 2015, transitioning to Dell server hardware started for both VxRail and ScaleIO Node platform offerings. Because the acquisition’s closure is still rather fresh, it’s interesting to see what direction the strategy towards SDS/HCI will take.
 
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is a well-established IT infrastructure company. Within this context the firm is best known for its hardware, be it server, network or storage. For a long time company’s storage portfolio only contained traditional shared storage platforms, from the high-end HP XP (actually Hitachi technology) to the mid-range HP Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) and later, after acquisition, 3PAR that eventually fit both segments. With the acquisition of LeftHand in 2008 HPE had adopted its first SDS offering, the Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA), later rebranded to StoreVirtual VSA. HPE’s vision currently centers on the realization of an easy-to-use private cloud through the HC380 platform. The company strategy however could take a sharp turn with the recent SimpliVity acquisition announcement.

Microsoft is a long-standing renowned software company, best known for its Windows OS and Office suite and, more recently, widely recognized as a major hypervisor vendor and a public cloud provider. It was not until Windows Server 2012 that Microsoft extended its Windows Server platform with a software-based storage solution, Storage Spaces. Taking all experiences from this first endeavor, the company launched Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) as part of Windows Server 2016 in October 2016. With the architecture of S2D being much more in line with what’s currently available in the industry than Storage Spaces, and the initial capabilities and integrations also being more mature, it’s compelling to see the future evolution and adoption of the platform.
 
Nutanix is probably the best-known hyper-converged start-up company on the market today. From 2011 onwards it gradually stepped up its ambitions. The first milestone was to provide customers with a simple-to-use fast scale-out storage platform. Along the way the company introduced Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), its very own KVM-based hypervisor that is gradually evolving to rival the well-known hypervisor platforms. Next the firm envisioned the Nutanix platform to evolve into a complete private cloud stack for the mid-sized and enterprise market. Nutanix has been renowned for its innovation cycle and the latest major release of the core software (AOS 5.0) is no different, setting the first steps in realizing this goal. In 2016 Nutanix also went public through an IPO.

SimpliVity introduced its Data Virtualization Platform (DVP) in 2013. The hyper-converged solution differentiated itself immediately from other products by choosing an in-house developed hardware accelerator PCIe card to perform both deduplication and compression, and to act as the platform’s write cache. Another unique trait is that next to server-storage consolidation SimpliVity has always strongly focused on providing extensive data protection options (backup and restore as well as DR) as native part of the solution, thus eliminating even more silos and complexity. In January 2017 HPE announced the acquisition of SimpliVity. How this event will affect the strategy and direction of the company, has yet to be determined.

VCE, which stands for Virtual Computing Environment, is a company born from a joint venture between VMware, Cisco and EMC. For a long time VCE produced converged solutions, vBlock and later VxBlock, that consisted of building blocks delivered by the three participating vendors. In 2014 Cisco stepped away and EMC became the primary owner of VCE. Late 2015 VCE started to offer its first hyper-converged solution VxRack, which used third-party server hardware and incorporated VMware vSAN. Later, in February 2016, VxRail was launched as the HCI sibling of vSAN and as the unofficial follow-up to EVO:Rail. For both HCI platforms VCE has developed a central managing layer for optimal customer experience. Because of the EMC acquisition by Dell VxRail switched to Dell server hardware late 2016.

VMware already had a long-standing reputation as a world-class hypervisor vendor before the company introduced its first SDS platform, vSAN, to the world in 2014 as part of the VMware software-defined datacenter (SDDC) vision. The vSAN solution is an integral part of the vSphere hypervisor platform. VMware has been investing heavily in vSAN since and the storage platform has matured considerably as a result, gaining a lot of new functionality with every major release and integrating further with other components in the VMware SDDC stack. The company partnered with several server hardware vendors in the EVO:Rail program to offer vSAN as a HCI platform. However, this first attempt was no success. In this regard the unofficial successor, VCE VxRail, shows much more promise.

Market Dynamics
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What happened in the past 12 months? The timeline diagram reports the most significant events that happened throughout 2016 and at the start of 2017. In all there were 4 all-new platforms introductions: VCE released VxRail (based on vSAN software), HPE released HC380, Cisco introduced the all-new HyperFlex (based on SpringPath software) and Microsoft released the all-new Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) as integrated part of the Windows Server 2016 platform. There were also 3 major consolidations: Nutanix acquired software firms PernixData and Calm.io, Dell finalized the EMC acquisition and HPE announced the acquisition of SimpliVity. 2016 was also the year that Nutanix went public.

A high pace of innovation also marked the past 12 months, with on average vendors releasing 2 or 3 new software revisions for their SDS/HCI platforms that introduced new features and functions.

Number of Software Releases
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What is remarkable, is that two of the SDS platforms, EMC ScaleIO and HPE StoreVirtual VSA, only provided a single major platform update throughput 2016. Where other SDI/HCI vendors are adding significant improvements to the core SDS/HCI software, these initially strong platforms are starting to gradually fall behind. Both companies do have heavy ongoing investments in traditional shared storage platforms, so the observed slow pace in software development could very well be the result of an internal ‘conflict of interest’. HPE also used 2016 to primarily focus on creating and enhancing its second StoreVirtual-based HCI market offering, HPE HC380. While the recent acquisition of SimpliVity emphasizes HPE’s desire to have a strong presence in the SDS/HCI market, it also raises some rather important questions about HPE’s future storage portfolio choices and the position of HPE’s existing StoreVirtual VSA platform and its HCI siblings (HC250 and HC380).

Some of the most recent market dynamics have put Dell in a rather strong position within the SDS/HCI landscape as the leading server hardware provider. Dell’s completion of the EMC acquisition and Atlantis’ recent decision to strategically partner with Dell with regard to its HyperScale platform, have resulted in Dell server hardware to be used in 5 HCI platforms: Atlantis HyperScale (Dell exclusive), VCE VxRail (Dell exclusive), EMC ScaleIO Node (Dell exclusive; platform not yet included in the WhatMatrix), SimpliVity (Dell native) and Nutanix (Dell OEM). Although HPE’s recent acquisition of SimpliVity will probably mean a transfer from Dell to HPE server hardware, Dell still maintains a strong foothold in the SDS/HCI space.

Key Trends
The overall observation of the last couple of years is that SDS/HCI platform functionality is getting both deeper and broader in scope. The ultimate aim is not only to rival the functionality provided by long establish traditional shared storage solutions, but to surpass them altogether. The year 2016 was no exception. There was a lot of compelling new features introduced for the very first time, as well as other features being widely adopted by SDS/HCI vendors. At the same time, though, some features were clearly struggling to gain momentum, whereas some potential features simply did not see the light of day.

A summary of 2016’s feature highlights is listed in the table below.

SDS/HCI Feature Enhancements
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– Making a debut –

Full-stack integration. In 2016 vendors started to re-position their SDS/HCI storage platforms as integral part of an entire ecosystem, with the goal to extend the ease of deployment and management of the storage layer to the entire infrastructure stack. Nutanix InstantON VDI and Atlantis Virtual Workspace offerings for example show deep integration and unified management for the Citrix workspace ecosystem.

Native file services (NAS). Nutanix ECP was the first SDS/HCI platform to introduce native file services for home folder and departmental file share deployment. Because Nutanix’ NAS is a fully integrated solution, it also provides scale-out capabilities and is able to make use of the advanced features already present.

Storage QoS. In 2016 VMware was the only vendor so far to embed native QoS capabilities into its storage platform. In a time where application workloads seem to grow heavier with each passing day, QoS is a worthy addition to not only hybrid but also all-flash storage deployments.

Native DR orchestration. SimpliVity was the first SDS/HCI vendor to augment its DVP platform with native DR orchestration capabilities in order to provide streamlined DR and disconnect dependencies on specific vendor solutions (noticeably VMware SRM).
 
Integrated end-user self-service. Finally Nutanix and HPE introduced cloud-like properties to their respective platforms (ECP and HC380) by adding end-user self-service portal functionality in top of the hypervisor/storage stack. Using role-based access control (RBAC) end-users are provided a subset of compute and storage resources so they can, to a limited operational extent, deploy and manage VMs.

It is highly probable that all of these features will mature in 2017 and beyond, and that more SDS/HCI vendors will introduce similar functionality. For hypervisor vendors like VMware and Microsoft who propagate a single-stack approach, some of the debuting enhanced functionality already exists in other parts of their ecosystem. For them the task is to obtain maximum integration between the existing software layers.

– Fast Adoption Rate –

Broad server hardware vendor support. Throughout 2016 independent HCI vendors like Nutanix, SimpliVity and Atlantis Computing added additional server hardware support to provide customers with maximum choice and consequently close some of the flexibility gap with SDS platforms. However, the start of 2017 we’re also seeing signs of things moving in an opposite direction, such as Atlantis Computing and Dell forming a strategic partnership as well as HPE acquiring SimpliVity.

All-Flash composition. In 2016 almost every SDS/HCI vendor started to provide all-flash solutions next to the mostly hybrid (flash + magnetic) solution offerings, clearly hailing the advance of flash media within the storage spectrum. For HCI, in most cases all-flash was introduces in a separate model, but soon all-flash developed into a choice-offering for every existing model.
 
Bare-Metal platform support. To enable customers to pursue a single unified storage platform strategy, some HCI vendors implemented bare-metal host support next to hypervisor host support in 2016. Most SDS solutions already provided this type of support. For some SDS/HCI vendors bare-metal platform support is still thin with just a few OS versions on the compatibility list, whereas others support every major OS available.

Cost-effective small scale (ROBO) solution. To allow customers to use a storage platform in both the main datacenter as well as in remote offices and branch offices, many SDS/HCI vendors added 2-node solutions to their storage portfolio. At the same time most of the vendors also introduced cost-effective hardware models for this specific use-case to further drive down investment requirements.

Data encryption (software/hardware-based). The IT industry’s increased focus on privacy and data loss prevention translated into more SDS/HCI vendors adopting support for hardware data encryption capabilities through self-encrypting disks and/or third party data encryption software.

– Struggling Forward –

Support for Hyper-V. Several SDS/HCI vendors have been promising to add Hyper-V support to their platform for some years now, but were still not able to deliver on that promise in 2016. The outlook for 2017 is slightly better though, as at least SimpliVity is on the verge of officially declaring availability of Hyper-V support.

Support for non-Ethernet networks. Up till now all but a few SDS/HCI vendors have exclusively embraced high-speed Ethernet (10+ Gb/s) and thus offer no support for other high-speed network technologies like IB or FC. This holds true for all of the platforms that have been included in the WhatMatrix SDS/HCI listing so far. This means that organizations that have invested heavily in FC network in the past might not be swayed easily to transition to 10GbE networks.

Non-replica data protections schemes. With regard to data protection a lot of SDS/HCI vendor still cling to the effective but not very efficient replica strategy, sometimes complementing this with RAID on the hardware level. Some of the vendors are now offering either software RAID or Erasure Coding as economical alternatives, but on the whole these data protection schemes are still not widely adopted yet.

True network stack integration. SDS/HCI solutions have been all about simplifying the infrastructure by consolidating server and storage as well as eliminating the requirement for a physically separate storage network. Realizing deep integration between all these building blocks has proven to be more difficult though. At the moment the networking part is least integrated, but through the addition of vendors like Cisco this could very well change in the foreseeable future.

True third part backup platform integration. After all this time any real integration between with independent enterprise backup platforms (eg. Commvault, Netbackup and Veeam) is still in its infancy stages. Most SDS/HCI platforms still leave this entirely up to the hypervisor software. Mostly only Nutanix has been visibly driving the integration effort, for example with regard to CommVault Intellisnap and Veeam Direct NFS.

-Missing in Action –

Cloud-like buying model. Although most SDS/HCI vendor aim to bring many of the public cloud benefits to the datacenter, at the same time the commercial model has, strangely enough, remained very traditional. Vendors still only have buy-and-maintain options available instead of also offering pay-per-use options. And where these are available, they are simply only accessible for service providers and not for end-users.
 
Multi-cloud deployment model. The primary focus of many SDS/HCI vendors is still on providing (part of) a private cloud. At this point in time hybrid cloud integration just goes so far as to sending a copy of the data residing on the SDS/HCI platform to public cloud platforms like AWS or Microsoft Azure in order to provide an alternative means for backup and DR. None of the SDS/HCI platforms within the WhatMatrix category are actually providing production support for platform deployment inside the public cloud so you can leverage all the great features and benefits both on- and off-premises. Ironically some hardware-defined vendors like NetApp are ahead and do offer, even if it’s in a limited form (Cloud ONTAP), such a solution.

Unbounded storage scale-up. Although scaling-up resources is possible, it’s usually limited to a certain extent. At maximum you are confined to about 24 slots that are available inside a single server chassis. Only a replacement with larger capacity disks can further up the stakes. Support for one or more external disk shelves would certainly solve this problem, but alas, it’s simply not here.

Platform Comparison

As of Q1/17 (end-of-January timeframe) our SDS/HCI category comparison showcased a total of 95 scoreable features spread across 4 separate feature areas: Architecture, Data Availability, Data Services and Management. The diagram below exhibits the maximum scores that can be achieved in each of the individual areas (far left), and highlights the actual scores of each SDS/HCI platform that was included.

WhatMatrix SDS/HCI Platform Scores – January 2017
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Nutanix ECP Ultimate edition leads the pack with a 87% overall score, followed at a slight distance by SimpliVity DVP, VMware vSAN Enterprise edition and Atlantis USX with respective scores of 80%, 78% and 76%. Both Dell EMC ScaleIO and HPE StoreVirtual VSA are starting to lag behind due to their software release cycles having noticeably slowed down. Both Microsoft S2D and Cisco HyperFlex were relatively late to join the SDS/HCI fold and are expected to do much better as time progresses and new major releases add new and improved functionality to the core storage software.

Customer Base

Obtaining public information on actual customer numbers still proves to be a difficult exercise these days. The SDS/HCI market contains many start-up companies and involves quite a few all-new platforms. As a consequence, the individual customer base tends to be low during the first months or even years, because it takes time before customers start to adopt contemporary technology. It is logical that in the time period following the launch most vendors are hesitant to share customer numbers unless it is absolutely necessary, for example when potential investors demand them. Only when reaching a solid baseline or for companies that have decided to go public, it gets more common to share customer numbers.

Of the vendors included in the WhatMatrix SDS/HCI line-up Nutanix and VMware have published customers numbers most frequently over the past few years. Both of these companies have been relatively successful in the SDS/HCI market space which makes it a bit easier to disclose information on their customer base. Besides that Nutanix had its stock market launch in 2016 and thus is obligated to provide all sorts of quantitative information that is publically accessible.
The diagram below depicts the published customer numbers for both SDS/HCI platforms over the course of time.

SDS/HCI Customer Base Advancement
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Nutanix’s customer base has progressed nicely from 2013 and shows a lot of promise as the line starts to resemble an exponential curve. With approximately 4,500 customers in October 2016, Nutanix should have been able to surpass the 5,000 customer boundary before the start of 2017. This is quite a mean feat for a start-up company, especially when considering the fact that the customer base was below the 200 marker during the first 1.5 years after inception.

VMware’s history is very different. VMware was already a large well-known software company with a broad existing customer base before venturing into the SDS/HCI landscape. Despite the sound basis, VMware’s maiden vSAN product showed slow adoption rates among long-time VMware customers. End-users clearly had to get used to VMware offering them a storage solution. Besides that the first vSAN release did possess some weak base features and also lacked some advanced functionality. However, since the second major vSAN release we have mostly witnessed a steep curve upwards. At the end of January 2017 VMware hit another milestone by announcing they vSAN had reached the 7,000 customer boundary.

The individual results both companies have achieved with their respective SDS/HCI platform clearly shows that there is enough market traction for SDS/HCI solutions to claim a permanent position next to traditional shared storage solutions. The fact that adoption is growing steadily could pave the way for smaller innovative SDS/HCI companies to be successful as well.

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