Nutanix has come out tops in a report by the enterprise tech comparison website WhatMatrix that compares 10 hyperconverged infrastructure vendors and 12 products.
The suppliers, products and overall percentage ranking scores, (higher=better) are:
- Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform – 87.4%
- DataCore SANsymphony – 83.3%
- VMware VSAN – 76.6%
- Datrium DVX – 75.7%
- Pivot3 Acuity – 73%
- Cisco Hyperflex – 71.6%
- Dell EMC VxRail – 71.6%
- HPE SimpliVity – 71.2%
- NetApp HCI – 70.3%
- Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct – 68.5%
- Dell EMC VxFlex OS – 60.8%
- HPE StoreVirtual VSA – 59.5%
For the second edition of its HCI report WhatMatrix ranks suppliers according to seven criteria: data availability, data services, management, design and deploy, workload support, server support, and storage support.
Their scores are aggregated for an overall ranking by percentage and used to position suppliers in a “2D Landscape Matrix”.
As you can see below this is a set of four nested oblongs. The similarities to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and IDCs Marketscape are fairly obvious.
WhatMatrix says the “y-axis represents the overall technical capability determined by the total score generated by all technical evaluation features in the comparison matrix. (Higher=Better) The x-axis visualises leadership in listed focus areas i.e. in subset(s) of evaluation features that focus on a certain use case (specialty).”
The individual criteria ranking components are separately listed and explained with supplier scores. For instance:
The HCI landscape
The report points out that three platforms have made “remarkable progress” since a previous edition published 22 months ago. They are Cisco HyperFlex, Datrium DVX and Pivot3 Acuity.
However, “Dell EMC VxFlex OS and HPE VSA seem to be on their way out in favour of other platforms in the respective vendor portfolios. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) on the other hand just had its first major update in two years with the release of Windows Server 2019, but has been seemingly unable to make the comeback that was expected.”
But can it Scale?
Maxta and Scale Computing are notable omissions, although they are on the radar of report author Herman Rutten, WhatMatrix Spokesperson Jane Rimmer told us.
“But as the on-boarding process is very time consuming he’s not had the bandwidth to include them,” she said. “Plus, we need the vendors to be proactive in working with us and it’s a bit of a case of “he who shouts loudest”.
“The ones covered in the report have invested the time in working with us and we hope to expand the numbers over time … When we first created this comparison, it was just five vendors. If we can get them interested, we will certainly make a serious attempt to include them in the next report.”
What about WhatMatrix?
WhatMatrix is an unusual beast, part analyst-part website.
The company is self-funding and sustains itself through ‘enhanced listings’ where vendors can “show additional information on the site, engage with the visitors, etc.,” according to Rimmer.
She says this gives the organisation a “unique financial independence from investors or sponsors allows us the agnostic place/view that we currently provide.”
Availability
“Software Defined Storage and Hyperconverged Infrastructure 2018” is a freely available 42-page report. No registration is required.
