Gartner’s latest hyperconverged infrastructure magic quadrant (MQ) ranks VMware alongside Nutanix as the two leading suppliers.
In the November 2018 edition VMware lagged Nutanix on the visionary axis of the MQ. This year it overtook Nutanix on that score and ranked a little lower than its rival on ability to execute.
We have added white circles in our chart rendition (above) of the 2019 HCI MQ to show last year’s positions of suppliers with the largest moves. You can see that Dell EMC has been demoted – slightly – while Cisco has overtaken HPE.
The challengers and visionaries boxes are the same more or less as 2018 but there are several changes in the niche players’ square:
- Maxta has crashed and its assets bought by Chinese supplier Huayun Data Corp,
- Chinese supplier Sangfor Technologies enters for the first time,
- Red Hat moves leftwards as Gartner places it lower on the visionary axis.
- StorMagic and DataCore pretty much retain their previous positions.
All-in-all, the HCI scene looks stable and mature – although with this year’s showing, Microsoft looks poised to enter the MQ leaders’ box next year. Scale Computing and Pivot3 have not moved much in MQ position terms since last year and need to ramp efforts if they are to improve their positions.
Inside the box thinking
Here’s our standard MQ explainer: the magic quadrant is defined by axes labelled ‘ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision’, and split into four squares tagged ‘visionaries’, ‘niche players’, ‘challengers’ and ‘leaders’.
And here is Gartner’s hyperconverged infrastructure systems explainer: they are scale-out, software-integrated, modular systems using standard compute, storage and networking hardware and virtualization software as building blocks under unified management. They can be available as software to run on standard hardware or as integrated appliances.
