Singapore-based startup Arcfra has entered the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market and been named in Gartner’s latest Market Guide for Full-Stack HCI Software less than a year after launch.
CEO Wenhao Xu founded Arcfra in May 2024 and the company has since expanded operations into South Korea and other parts of the Asia-Pacific region. Wenhao Xu was previously co-founder and board chair of Chinese HCI company SmartX, based in Beijing from 2013 to 2024, and a software engineer at Oracle-acquired Nimbula in Mountain View from 2011 to 2012. He was a summer intern at VMware during his academic courses.
Wenhao Xu stated: “We are excited to be recognized by Gartner in the 2025 Market Guide for Full-Stack HCI Software. We believe this recognition reflects our vision of delivering agile, cost-effective, and future-ready infrastructure to enterprises navigating the post-VMware era.”
The company provides full infrastructure support for compute, storage (block and file), networking, security, and disaster recovery with a single resource pool. The company is featured in Gartner’s updated Market Guide for Full-Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software report, which was published last month.
The Arcfra Enterprise Cloud Platform (AECP) supports both virtualized and containerized applications, and provides security and disaster recovery features. The management layer includes API access along with observability and automation functions. The software is presented as a set of cloud service modules.
AECP requires a minimum of three nodes as a start point. It is available either through subscription or a perpetual license model and there are four offerings AECP Essential, AECP Standard, AECP Advanced and AECP VDI Essential. There are two supported hypervisors; VMware vSphere and AVE (Arcfra Virtualization Engine). AVE is built on KVM technology.
AECP Essential supports 80 TB of raw capacity per node. The other editions support up to 256 TB. Both NFS and iSCSI protocols are available, with the AECP VDI Essential offering limited to NFS. The file system is built directly on bare devices, said to be more suitable for accessing high-performance block storage, avoiding the overhead of the existing Linux file system.
Both all-flash and hybrid SSD + disk drive storage is supported with cold data automatically tiered to disk. Data is moved between cluster nodes using RDMA. With a cluster boost mode setting, the “vhost protocol shares memory between Guest OS, QEMU, and ABS to optimize I/O request processing and data transfer, improving VM performance and reducing I/O latency.” ABS stands for Arcfra Block Storage.
All four AECP versions support erasure coding and encryption at rest. Drive-level data block checksums provide silent data corruption protection. System-level protection is available at the node, rack, and site level. The system provides high-availability and stretched active:active clustering. There is a storage snapshot function and automatic recovery for component or node failure.
The specifications are listed here. Download an AECP product brief here.
Arcfra claims a 50 percent reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) compared with VMware, and it is positioning itself as a VMware migration target with cost-efficiency as a focal point.
Gartner’s report lists eight representative HCI product suppliers: Anchao Cloud Software, Arcfra, Broadcom (VMware), Microsoft, Nutanix, Oxide, Sangfor, and Softiron. It does not include Scale Computing, SmartX, or StorMagic, but then it is a representative and not an exhaustive list.
Anchao, Arcfra, Oxide, Sangfor, and Softiron are classed as regional suppliers with the others being global.
Bootnote
We are told Wenhao founded Arcfra for three reasons:
- Using a more simplified and streamlined product to address enterprise cloud infrastructure challenges in the AI era, especially building enterprise AI infrastructure.
- Capturing market trends such as VMware alternative, cloud repatriation and VM-Container convergence.
- Providing products and services for worldwide customers. With the current installed base in Asia, Arcfra is planning to set up regional headquarters in Europe & USA in 2025 H2.
Arcfra is funded by Vertex Ventures and other major investors.
