How do you win at HCI? It's SimpliVity ... or maybe not, right Dell?

What a difference a year makes: just 12 little months ago HPE was ruling the integrated systems roost, but fast forward and it has slipped behind as Nutanix and Dell EMC streak ahead - the latter with help from its VSAN gear. In the latest Gartner HCI Magic Quadrant (MQ), hyperconverger Nutanix is bossing the HCI market, with …

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you really comparing like with like though? HCI MQ vs Integrated Systems MQ?

[baspax]

It's a total mess. I've read the complete report now (thank you Nutanix for spamming my inbox) and pinged two buddies at VCE/Dell and Cisco. Quite some interesting opinions.

The software only requirement is completely ludicrous IMHO. One poster below already said that this should disqualify HPE Simplivity. I would add it should also disqualify VxRack (requires high performance Nexus 3000 switches) and theoretically also disqualify Cisco UCS as it requires UCS fabric interconnects (high speed network fabric).

But if we accept that as a criteria, then we also have to disqualify Nutanix. While their new "Turbo" feature is theoretically available for all platforms it only makes sense with RDMA. For that you have to use specific Mellanox or Arista switches and RDMA adapters.

This "hardware independent" requirement is so 2016 to be honest. After years of general purpose computing we are seeing more and more specialization in hardware, esp for encryption, compression, and low latency data transport. We will have vendors like Nutanix who will try to do everything in software (because they have to) and vendors like Dell, HPE, and Cisco add custom ASICs and FPGA (or specialized merchant silicon such as Nvidia and Qualcomm). Perhaps SimpliVity was just ahead of their time.

[DuncanL]

How do you win at HCI?

You just win at HCI.

And HTJI...

[find users who cut cat tail]

Re: How do you win at HCI?

Win at hydrochloric acid? Don't drink the stuff for start...

[baspax]

This MQ is useless

The cutoff date was April 2017. That was a year ago, the industry moves too fast.

[Anonymous Coward]

Something seriously wrong about this

"The latest HCI MQ focuses exclusively on vendors and products in the hyperconverged software segment, and drops the system hardware requirement. That means the HCI picture is not muddied by integrated systems and reference architectures any more, and software-only HCI systems are included, such as VMware's VSAN."

So how come HPE SimpliVity is in the MQ at all? AFAIK it requires this custom FPGA card and doesn't work without it.