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Beyond virty boxen and hyperconvergence: Regard the mighty data centres of the future

Riding that software-defined wave

HCIA startups

Doron Kempel, who co-founded, ran and sold Diligent and its deduplication technology to IBM in 2008, founded Simplivity. Three years later, he had his 2U OmniCube product that he said collapsed the multi-layered IT stack.

Four Omnicubes could deliver the same payload performance, functionality and protection as a legacy IT stack of servers and VMware, a storage switch, high-availability shared storage, backup deduping appliance, WAN optimisation, cloud gateway, SSD array and a storage caching appliance. The OmniCube quartet would be one-half to one-third the acquisition cost – around $50,000 per cube – and provide a two- to threefold reduction in operating costs.

Pandey’s Nutanix developed a clustered file system, run through virtualised controllers in clustered compute appliances that formed a virtual SAN. Company co-founder Mohit Aron led the design and development of the Google File System. Now their company leads the hyper-converged market.

Following Nutanix and Simplivity a whole raft of other startups came into view, some with hyper-converged system software and specifications which partners could use to build HCIAs.

NIMBOXX, for example, started up in 2012. It designed its own 1U hardware box and operating system, the MeshOS, using KVM and a Hadoop-style shared-nothing management model. There can be, it says, hundreds of its nodes in a system and customers can have a Google-style data centre by using it.

The rise of Nutanix, Simplivity and their followers helped prompt VMware into developing its own VSAN product. This then became part of VMware’s EVO:RAIL specification for a hyper-converged system to be built by partners. EMC then based its VSPEX Blue specification on EVO: Rail for its partners to build and sell systems.

HCIA Progress

So how are the hyper-converged system suppliers going and what does the future of the hyper-converged data centre look like?

We can use a Wikibon consultancy report for an indication of that.

HCIA_2014_supplier_revenues

Nutanix is far and away the market leader, with Simplivity a strong second but some way behind and followed fairly closely by VMware, Pivot 3 and Scale Computing. Then the 2014 tail-enders start: Maxta, EMC, Gridstore, NIMBOXX and Stratoscale. New-entrants Breqwatr with an all-flash HCIA, and Atlantis with a software-defined HCIA, are not on the list of course.

Simplivity and Nutanix are both doing well, with Nutanix extending its capabilities by adding KVM hypervisor support and looking to develop file-serving and container support. It has passed 1,200 customers and reached a $300m-a-year run rate.

Simplivity says its sales grew 250 per cent in the first half of 2015, with more than 2,000 deployments.

Mainstream server suppliers like Dell and Cisco are OEM'ing Nutanix (Dell) and partnering Simplivity (Cisco). EMC has its EVO: Rail-based VSPEX Blue initiative while we are waiting to hear if Lenovo is going to do anything.

Next page: Market development

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