Hyperconverged market gets hyper-competitive as new riders enter field The hyperconverged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) market has become hypercompetitive as the two-horse race between Dell and Nutanix has been blown open with HPE/SimpliVity, NetApp and Cisco chasing them. Three things happened this week: Cisco's boss Chuck Robbins said of its HyperFlex product: "We certainly would like to …
HPE made a huge mistake (not their first!) in acquiring Simplivity; fortunately for them, it cost less than a billion dollars.
Simplivity's single point of failure h/w as well as their single admin username/password (all customers share the same admin password and it is unchangeable; this is why you must contact Simplivity Support to upgrade your system - you can't have the password) are hurdles too great for them to overcome. Add-on to the fact that they cannot support more than 6-8 nodes in a cluster and you can see this is a small-business competitor only. Also, I think they still only support ESXi.
All I'm saying is no service provider would ever use Simplivity: Too small an architecture, too much effort to upgrade, and too insecure. Furthermore, no govt institution is allowed to use it due to the inherent shortcomings in the architecture since all customers have the same admin password. This is an absolute security nightmare!
I have no idea why HPE would want to buy Simplivity, but they did. Better to not be in the market at all than to be known as the worst of the bunch.
Simplivity is a clear leader in HCI according to both Gartner and Forrester. HPE needs to catch up in the CI/HCI space. It doesn't take much to understand why they acquired Simplivity. The single point of failure point gets thrown out a lot, but is actually a false claim. Their product is very solid, and with HPE's engineering resources and sales force behind them, things could get very interesting.
Like how Aruba, SGI, DEC, Compaq, 3com, Tandem, etc... all benefited from HPE sales and engineering? There are plenty more, but HPE buys companies in that top right quadrant, rides them a few months and as the customers start looking elsewhere, they buy someone else. HPE has been a chop shop since the dot com era.
I'm not saying Cisco is better with a track record like they have with Cloupia and now Cliqur, but HPE is where IT innovation goes to die.
Even HPE born and raised hardware is so ignored by engineering that ILO is damn near unusable at this time. It's API barely works, it's command line fails more often than it works. It's SNMP is actually insecure and practically and industry joke. Oh, and if you want it to work "right" it requires you keep an unpatched Windows XP with IE 7 or 8 to even get KVM to operate semi-ok. As for installing client certs... just don't bother.
It's a cluster so there's no SPOF, the accelerator could be positioned as a point of failure but only on the node itself, much like a motherboard is on any HCI node from any vendor.
Max node count per cluster is much higher these days 32 from memory, upgrades have just been made simpler in the latest release with a workflow based upgrade manager.
Hyper-V and KVM support are also there going forward and HPE has plenty of experience here with both storevirtual and storeonce VSA's and they've also put in a lot of work around unified management.
As for the RBAC and security complaints I think HPE can very quickly sort those assuming they're even still a thing given how out of date your other comments have been.
Looks like an astute bit of business to me, they now have a huge channel and customer base to go after twinned with the best selling enterprise server HW in the market as well as a burgeoning data fabric providing data mobility between platforms.
Now the FUD's been put to bed, what else are do you think they might be missing ?
Nutanix is getting pummeled during renewals. For some reason (haha I kid I kid, they are short on money and are squeezing the installed base), the are increasing renewal prices massively and customers are pissed. Basically all their initial larger install are looking at options. Not everyone will switch, but many will.
Nutanix is toast.
Is it a competition to see who will pay the most money to keep using VMware? Honestly, storage is part of the base OS now... networking too... unless you want to pay more and use VMware... which well doesn't really solve anything anymore. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for retro things. But it seems like hyperconverged products from EMC, Cisco, HP/Simplivity or NetApp is more about spending money for absolutely no apparent reason.
In addition, I can't really understand why server vendors are still screwing around with enterprise SSD when Microsoft, Gluster and others have obsoleted the need for it. Dual-ported SAS or NVMe seems like the dumbest idea I've heard of in a while.
People, reliability, redundancy and performance comes from sharding and scale out. When you depend on things like dual-ported storage, you actually limit your reliability, performance and redundancy.
And no... fibre channel is longer a viable option for storage connectivity anymore. Why do you think the FC ASIC vendors are experimenting with alternative protocols over their fabrics?
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