HCI isn't an enhanced server ...
So the proposition starts with "Say HCI is an advanced server", and then carrys on to a set of conclusions based on that premise. Not a bad set of conclusions, assuming the vast majority of HCI purchasers are people who have brand loyalty to DL380's or R270's or whatever other server type / vendor you have familiarity with, but I think the premise is flawed because theres' nothing that enhanced about HCI hardware.
From my perspective (which is of course informed by, but not limited to, the perspective of my employer), watching server vendors make the claim that their particular 1U or 2U server was "best suited" to VMWare at VMworld / Vforum events since about 2006, the VMware folks didn't really care. More often than not they were happy that server virtualisation completely commoditised the underlying hardware so they didn't have to care.
About the only difference I could see between a typical HCI box and the 1U / 2U rackmount DL380 style server with a handful of hard drives that was the mainstay of virtual server infrastructures is that HCI typically used a "4 in a box" configuration with 24 drives. I'm sure that if you locked a bunch of techs from Lenovo, HP, Dell, Fujistu, Huawei, Quanta and SuperMicro into a cage and got them to argue about the merits of their particular flavour of 4-in-a-box it might get interesting, but I don't think the VMware or business folks really care, provided they come in at a competetive price with good enough quality and service contracts.
The main enhancements with HCI is in the initial setup and expansion, user interface and software defined storage layer .. all of which are software things, not hardware things.
If server brand loyalty was a major determining factor, then I'd expect to see HP with a MUCH bigger marketshare with VSAN on HP vs what your graphs show with Dell, even with their current difficulties. I suspect those old "DL380 or die" guys are still buying DL380s and not moving into HCI.
BUT when the VMware guys get tired of fighting with the server team and the storage team and decide to take their fate into their own hands, current server brand loyalties mean very little, and may even work against the incumbent vendor as the VMware team decide to keep the old fogeys in server team out of their newly built walled garden.
Longer term, I'd expect to see the commoditisation of compute continue, with VMware / Internal cloud teams wanting take advantage of the Taiwanese ODM economies of scale .. because the ODM's seem to be the only people really growing. HP tried to keep up with them, supplying Azure, until it turned out it wasn't profitable enough for them. It won't go all the ODM's way of course, Dell seems pretty focussed on winning the private cloud war, as does HP, but of the US vendors Dell looks to be in a better position there because they own VMware (or maybe the other way around soon), but thats a VMware value prop, not a Dell hardware / organisation story.
Unlike blades, HCI doesn't seem to be an enhanced kind of server, it's an enhanced way of integrating the best parts of a software defined datacenter stack, and turning commodity compute into something more useful.. once you look at it that way, hardware incumbency starts to look kind of irrelevant.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
