Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories and Deployment Types
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Hyperconvergence has quickly become a popular option for IT infrastructures, no matter the size of the company or the industry in which it operates. Users like the simplicity and cloud-like experience offered by most advanced solutions. Moreover, several vendors are now working on solutions that keep the user experience similar across multiple environments—including major public cloud platforms—to help customers reach their hybrid and multicloud goals.
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions for large-enterprise deployments and those specifically designed to address small-to-medium business (SMB) use cases share most of the same core characteristics. The main differences involve the scale of deployment required for SMBs. SMBs care more about minimum cluster size, high efficiency, and small configurations. The minimum size of the cluster is very important for many organizations to meet so they can keep the purchase price low. Often, users just want to run a bunch of VMs in a remote site or branch office, and they want the best availability at the lowest cost. For such users, HCI vendors created specialized solutions that can start very small, often with just two or three tiny nodes, while maintaining the resources necessary to run applications.
Integration is another important aspect of HCI solutions. SMB IT organizations tend to prefer that data protection and disaster recovery (DR) are integrated into the HCI platform. SMB organizations generally have only a few locations to manage rather than the hundreds of locations that enterprises use or the thousands for edge deployments.
With this orientation in mind, it’s clear that SMB HCI differs from standard enterprise deployments, which are not limited by strict budgets and available cluster resources.
This GigaOm Radar report highlights key SMB HCI vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating Hyperconverged Infrastructure Solutions,” we describe in more detail the key features and metrics used to evaluate vendors in this market.
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.
Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.