VMworld 2017: All Things HCI

As VMware gets its mojo back and the secondary storage part of the market explodes, the world of hyper-converged vendors keep chugging along.

While we've seen some consolidation—SimpliVity got bought by HPE, Atlantis Computing didn't make it—there are still lots of companies trying to make a go of it in the competitive HCI market as standalone companies.

Pivot3 is talking up its position as “one of the top three HCI vendors” according to Chief Marketing Officer Bruce Milne. He told me Pivot3 plans to lead with its technology. The new Acuity platform has a focus on performance and quality-of-service settings, and Pivot3 is adding support for NVMe based flash storage which is fast becoming the new standard for high-performance storage.

Milne told me Pivot3 has over 2000 customers already, and is growing strongly. “We had 85% growth last year, which was actually too fast,” he said. “70% growth is our goal this year.” While there are plenty of companies who would no doubt kill for growth of only 70%, I like that Pivot3 is aware of the perils of growing too fast. Cash is the oxygen for a growing company, and many a fast-growing startup has asphyxiated because it grew too fast and ran out of cash.

Maxta was also making some noise at VMworld this year, directly taking aim at rival Nutanix with it's “Your Way” campaign. The company was giving out buttons with the slogan “You can't have it your way with Nutanix” on them, but they mysteriously disappeared. Maxta is talking up the anti lock-in sentiment that is swirling around the industry at the moment, so we'll see how well this resonates with customers.

HyperGrid was talking up its newly announced HyperCloud offer that seeks to provide the same consumption model as public cloud only on-site. It's not clear to me how this is different from renting VMs hosted at an MSP, but I still draw analogies between public cloud and renting MIPS on a mainframe, so what do I know? I can see the appeal for leasing data-centre kit like it's a fleet of laptops.

Scale Computing lobbed a cheeky announcement into the fray, announcing extremely low-latency NVMe-based storage abilities on its HCI gear. CTO Phil White told me that it's due to the way the company's SCRIBE storage engine functions. “There's no hypervisor between the VMs and the storage,” he said. Scale will likely OEM solutions based on this platform as it doesn't quite match its focus on SMB customers—at least, not today. As NMVe performance becomes more widespread, it will no doubt come to be seen as standard, just as flash storage in laptops is now the norm. Once you've experiences it, going back to spinning disk just feels sloooow.

I also spoke to newcomer Datrium, which is doing something it calls open convergence, as distinct from hyper-convergence. Datrium splits out compute storage from the persistent storage, putting a thin caching layer in the compute hosts and pushing persistent data down into storage nodes. Datrium CEO Brian Biles told me he sees it more as the convergence of compute, primary storage, and secondary storage, but without the tight-coupling that was the hallmark of HCI, particularly early on.

Given pretty much every HCI vendor has added multiple densities of compute and storage, including some with storage-only nodes—that are definitely not SANs, by the way—there's an obvious need to be able to scale compute and storage independently of one another. Datrium seems to have built something interesting that is worth keeping an eye on.

Of course, the big gorilla here is VMware's VSAN which continues to enjoy strong support from customers, and is one of the twin-engines of VMware growth this year, the other being NSX. Flash is now mainstream rather than a high-end niche product, and VSAN is an easy buy for customers already firmly entrenched in the VMware ecosystem. The buzz from customers at VMworld was strongly supportive of VSAN as a viable option for their businesses, so we can expect to see strong growth in the next few quarters at least.

There is still plenty of legacy storage out there that will be gradually replaced as it full depreciates and gets swapped out for the latest and greatest option. HCI vendors without a strong niche of their own will increasingly struggle to compete against VSAN as it becomes even more feature rich and the obvious safe choice. The early adopters will have already made their choice, and it will then be a battle for the more risk-averse customers who respond well to the perceived safety of a well-established brand with a solid track record.

Expect to see more consolidation and perhaps the odd failure in this market.

This article first appeared in Forbes.com here.