HYPER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE
CISCO HYPERFLEX
WINNER: OVERALL
HyperFlex combines Cisco’s HX Data Platform and its UCS server portfolio with integrated fabric networking. HyperFlex is a fully integrated appliance that supports VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, while users can scale compute and storage independently of one another. This year, Cisco rolled out several updates to HyperFlex including AppDynamics for monitoring across multiple clouds. The offering can be bundled with CloudCenter, Cisco’s hybrid cloud management platform. Meanwhile, the Cisco HyperFlex Anywhere strategy extends the simplicity of hyper-convergence from core to edge and multi-cloud through integration with Cisco’s Intersight Software-as-a-Service management platform.
Subcategory Winner—Technology: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform
The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform uses native AHV virtualization with Nutanix’s software-defined storage, compute, data security, software-defined networking and management software. Nutanix’s AHV hypervisor enables reduced cost and an easy migration path, while the company offers robust management with its Prism offering.
Subcategory Winner—Revenue and Profit: HPE SimpliVity
Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s flagship hyper-converged infrastructure offering, SimpliVity, provides robust storage efficiency and data reduction services with always-on global deduplication and compression. Major enhancements for HPE SimpliVity have included the integration of HPE InfoSight, an artificial intelligence management platform that provides the ability to predict and prevent infrastructure issues.
Finalist: Dell Technologies VxRail
VxRail is a tightly integrated platform co-engineered with VMware that includes Dell Technologies’ market-leading servers, storage and software management solutions. VMware Manager comes preinstalled with a dashboard for automating VxRail deployment and configuration, while Dell has lowered the entry point for HCI to let midsize clients start with a two-node VxRail cluster.
Finalist: Scale Computing HC3
Scale Computing’s flagship Hyperconverged Compute Cluster, HC3, leverages its own KVM-based hypervisor together with its management, compute, storage pooling and network virtualization capabilities. Scale Computing’s hybrid cloud integration connects on-premises and cloud infrastructure and data via its HC3 Cloud Unity offering.
