The proliferation of hyper-convergence in the global market has forced organizations to rethink existing enterprise architecture. As the face of integration—enterprise applications, services, and data—change with growing business needs, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) promises to sustain the digital requirements and the increasing BYOD culture. Leveraging API-centric connectivity, connected servers, and automated data control, HCI solution providers are changing talent demographics and opening newer alternatives for maximum efficiency and flexibility. The HCI technology is currently one of the best options for businesses that have heavily invested in virtualization technologies but are still burdened with the complexity and cost of data protection and storage. Helping organizations reduce expense, improve performance, and harden security, many solution providers are offering game-changing business models equipped with blockchain, cognitive services, and new data insights to optimize user experiences.
A large number of enterprises are working to create and deliver the best HCI solutions using the perfect mix of these technologies teaming with open APIs, Internet of things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud solutions. Additionally, hypervisors for virtualized computing, software-defined storage, and virtualized networking are allowing companies to make the maximum utilization of standard, off-the-shelf servers. Leveraging this growing trend of ‘as-a-service’ offerings, technologists, industry leaders, and startups are infusing HCI-centric innovations into their products, proposing a fresh foundation to implement infrastructure services that ensure a dependable and risk-free business and process optimizations. The HCI technology is also a great alternative for companies that require some of their operational functionality of the public cloud while keeping the solution in house.
Hyper-converged infrastructure is considered to be a fast-growing, fast-changing emerging market as the market forces such as fierce competition and buyer demand accelerates the maturity of the market that sports only a few dominant vendors. Based on the current scenario, the only survivors in this market may be vendors with robust partner ecosystems and/or vendors with commercial variants of open source platforms. At its core, HCI enables the building up and scaling out of systems using servers as building blocks. As of present, although some support Microsoft Hyper-V and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisors, the majority of the hyper-converged vendors support VMware's market-leading hypervisor software. Established hyper-converged player Nutanix sells its own Acropolis hypervisor product based on open source KVM while continuing also to support VMware hypervisors.
Businesses should know precisely what they are getting when purchasing an HCI offering, with a promise that the various modules will work well together and are easily managed. For many decision-makers, it’s time to re-evaluate fundamental infrastructure choices, and in order to help organizations choose the right HCI solution provider, a distinguished panel comprising of CEOs, CIOs, analysts, and the CIO Applications’ editorial board, has reviewed companies with a proven record of expertise in assisting enterprises with cloud-based solutions and strategies. The panel typically reviews various parameters such as storage and security protocols, the file system functions like sharing among others to catalogue the finalists. In this edition of CIO Applications, we present to you the “Top 10 HCI Solution Providers - 2019.”
