2015-16 HYPER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE BUYER’S GUIDE€¦ · Granular scalability and simplified management yield ongoing benefits in agility and IT staff efficiency. At a minimum,

2017-18 HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE APPLIANCE BUYER’S GUIDE By Charley McMaster and Ken Clipperton

The Insider’s Guide to Evaluating Hyperconverged Infrastructure Appliances

E M P O W E R I N G T H E I T I N D U S T RY W I T H A C T I O N A B L E A N A LY S I S · W W W. D C I G . C O M

2017-18 HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE APPLIANCE BUYER’S GUIDEThe Insider’s Guide to Evaluating Hyperconverged Infrastructure Appliances

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Table of Contents

1 Introduction

3 Executive Summary

5 The Purpose of This Buyer’s Guide

5 How to Use this Buyer’s Guide

6 Disclosures

6 Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

7 The Eight-Step Process Used to Rank the Products

8 DCIG Comments —The Business Value of Hyperconverged Infrastructure

8 Streamlined Infrastructure

8 Automated Provisioning

8 Incremental and Customized Scaling

8 Hypervisor Flexibility

9 Data protection

9 Simple Adoption in the Enterprise

9 Feature Areas Where DCIG Expects to See Improvement

9 Resource-Optimized Nodes

9 Rapid Adoption of NVMe

9 Next-generation Ethernet

9 Integration with Existing Infrastructure

9 Performance and Pricing

10 DCIG Observations

10 Recommended Ranking

11 Excellent Ranking

12 Hyperconverged Infrastructure Appliance Rankings

14 Hyperconverged Infrastructure Products15 Dell EMC VxRail Series

16 Dell EMC XC630-10

17 Dell EMC XC6320-6

18 Dell EMC XC730 Series

19 HPE Hyper Converged 250 for Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard

20 HPE Hyper Converged 250 VMware Platform System Standard

21 HPE Hyper Converged 380 VMware Platform System Standard

22 HPE SimpliVity OmniCube CN-1400




26 HPE SimpliVity OmniStack

27 Lenovo HX2710-E

28 Lenovo HX3000 Series

29 Lenovo HX5510

30 Lenovo HX7510

31 Nutanix NX-1000 Series




35 Pivot3 Acuity X-Series

36 Pivot3 HCI All-Flash

37 Pivot3 HCI Blades

38 Pivot3 HCI Hybrid

Appendices

A-1 Appendix A—Definitions, Explanations and Terminology

B-1 Appendix B—Vendor Contact Information

C-1 Appendix C—DCIG Contact Information

This Buyer’s Guide Edition is licensed to Pivot3 with unlimited and unrestricted distribution rights through May 31, 2018.

© 2017 DCIG, LLC. All rights reserved.


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Introduction Hyperconverged infrastructure appliances (HCI) are taking the data center by storm. These pre-integrated solutions unite—or converge—as much of the data center infrastructure as possible into a scale-out cluster, managed as a single entity by a single application. HCI reduces capital and operational costs through rapid deployment, non-disruptive granular scalability and simplified virtualization-centric management. Rapid deployment enables quick time-to-value. Granular scalability and simplified management yield ongoing benefits in agility and IT staff efficiency.

At a minimum, HCI appliances combine compute, storage and data protection functions. Some HCI solutions leverage advances in software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) to extend HCI management to the data center network.

HCI solutions are easy to expand. The most common physical instantiation of—and unit of scaling for—hyperconverged infrastructure is a 1U–2U rack-mountable appliance contain-ing 1–4 cluster nodes. Simply install a new node, or multi-node appliance, and the system detects and aggregates the new resources. HCI eliminates the time consuming work of inte-grating and testing disparate technologies and enables IT teams to quickly and incrementally increase performance and/or storage resources to meet evolving business demands.

Server virtualization technologies led the first wave of data center consolidation. Server virtualization reduced server sprawl and improved processor utilization. However, the complexity of integrating disparate data protection, networking, and storage resources remained, along with the cost of each of these components.

Advances in technology, including multi-core CPUs, high-density flash memory and inline deduplication are enabling a new wave of consolidation, and are key drivers of the HCI revolution. HCI leverages these advances to converge the core data center technologies into an appliance. HCI software melds multiple appliances into a scale-out cluster and virtualizes the resources of the cluster to create virtual pools of these resources across the entire solution. In so doing, it decouples virtual machines and their applications from specific physical resources.

Pre-integrated data protection technologies including snapshots, backup and replication further aid and simplify HCI deployment and adoption. Organizations may be able to eliminate third-party backup software by utilizing HCI data protection features, including VM-centric backup software that integrates with the other data protection features of the HCI solution to quickly and cost-effectively protect VMs. All the HCI solutions in this guide also integrate with 3rd party backup software, enabling them to fit into existing data protection schemes.

HCI solutions clearly resonate with organizations. Dell EMC reports that sales of its HCI products are its fastest growing line of products ever. Sales of its HCI products may surpass its converged infrastructure products as soon as 2018. A recent Gartner report predicts that HCI will become a $5B market by 2019 up from $2B in 2016.1

Clearly, hyperconverged is hot. As a result, the label is being applied to a variety of products. As such, it is important to clarify how the term hyperconverged is used in this DCIG 2017–18 Hyperconverged Infrastructure Appliance Buyer’s Guide. DCIG defines a hyperconverged infrastructure appliance (HCI) as a self-contained appliance that combines virtualized compute, storage and data protection functions from a single vendor with pre-installed software including hypervisor and scale-out cluster management functionality.

1. “Gartner Says Hyperconverged Integrated Systems Will Be Mainstream in Five Years.”Gartner. Gartner, n.d.




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Introduction (continued)

Several factors make HCI solutions appealing to organizations:

• Simplified management. HCI solutions provide a framework to manage servers, networking and storage without the need for multiple IT specialists, specialized training or separate administration tools. Even in distributed environ-ments, this management framework exists where solutions in remote or branch offices can be administered centrally.

• Easy expansion. HCI solutions minimize or even eliminate painful data migra-tions and legacy rip-and-replace methods of growth. Compute and capacity is expanded by non-disruptively adding a new appliance or node to the cluster.

• Customized resource scaling. Several vendors now offer capacity- or performance-optimized nodes allowing organizations to target upgrades to address the constrained resources.

• Infrastructure savings. Traditional data center solutions may require a half rack or even a full rack of equipment, including: servers, storage array and networking. Today, some HCI appliances provide a four-node solution in just two rack units. Power, cooling and space consolidation yields bottom-line savings.

• Simplified disaster recovery and high-availability solutions. HCI solutions provide fundamental disaster recovery and high-availability functionality potentially reducing the need for third party products.

HCI solutions hold much promise through improved operational efficiencies, simplified management purpose-built for the IT generalist and designed to grow with an organiza-tion. HCI solutions are transforming the data center by delivering a complete compute, storage and data protection solution.

Charley and Ken




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Executive Summary

IT professionals are perennially under the “do more with less” directive. This paradox leads to a search for ways to simplify the infrastructure without sacrificing current capabilities or the flexibility to meet future business requirements. Enter the hyperconvergence scale-out architecture, which is transforming the modern data center.

Organizations of any size can reap the benefits of hyperconvergence. Small and midsized businesses (SMBs) may use hyperconverged infrastructures to replace entire existing compute and primary storage environments, and potentially the existing data protection solutions. Larger environments may benefit from HCI by replacing outdated servers and storage arrays during the next refresh cycle. They may also choose HCI solutions at remote locations that can be centrally managed.

HCI appliances integrate the compute, networking and storage of individual nodes into a virtual pool of resources. As new nodes are brought online, the system detects and adds the new resources to the pool, effectively expanding processing, memory and stor-age resources in a single step. HCI software provides the virtualization, data protection, management, and orchestration services that enable the solution to be managed as a single entity. The simplification provided by this integrated approach explains why many CIOs and IT directors find HCI solutions intriguing.

Hyperconverged infrastructures are not a panacea for every IT infrastructure need. However, for many environments, HCI offers several advantages over a siloed server plus traditional SAN or NAS approach to data center infrastructure.

• Agility. Hyperconverged infrastructures provide an agile architecture that can grow (or contract) quickly as business needs dictate. Resources are added by simply installing a new node and letting the system detect and aggregate the resources then rebalance the workloads.

• Frugality. Reducing costs is a major driver of HCI adoption. Hyperconverged solutions reduce both capital and operating expenditures.

• CapEx Savings. HCI’s scale-out agility eliminates over-provisioning by enabling organizations to ‘pay-as-you-grow.’ In contrast, traditional scale-up storage systems have fixed limits on performance resources. Therefore, organizations must predict performance requirements through the expected life of the storage system and purchase that performance up front. As a result, traditional storage systems are often over-provisioned, wasting valuable CapEx resources.

• OpEx Savings. HCI also reduces operational expenses through a reduction in rack space, power, cooling and administration costs.

• Simplicity. Increasingly, organizations are utilizing IT generalists to manage infrastructure resources. HCI solutions are tailored for these environments by removing much of the inherent storage complexities found in legacy systems. This frees IT staff to focus on business growth tasks.

Some HCI vendors entered the market with a focus on the SMB market, or on one special-ized use case such as VDI or video surveillance storage. These uses are still an excellent fit for HCI; however, HCI solutions are used for a growing number of use-cases, including primary enterprise workloads.




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Executive Summary (continued)

Executive Summary (continued)Five common use cases for HCI include:

• VDI. VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) was the initial reason many organizations implemented HCI. The linear scaling of compute, networking and storage in HCI solutions matches well with VDI boot and performance requirements.

• ROBO. Simple deployment plus centralized administration make HCI a great fit for remote office and branch office (ROBO) installations. Data protection at ROBO locations is often neglected. With HCI, data protection policies can be deployed across the solution ensuring that all data is protected.

• Server Virtualization/Consolidation. Enterprises can reduce their data center footprint (rack space, power and cooling ) by consolidating separate compute and storage components with an HCI solution. Although HCI has often been regarded as a small business or secondary storage solution, HCI vendors are now positioning their solutions as primary data center infrastructure suitable for even the most demanding enterprise applications.

• Dev/Test. Because of the automation and flash-enabled zero overhead cloning features of many HCI solutions, dev/test environments become easy to stand up and maintain with minimal intervention from IT. Developers can utilize their own virtual machines and virtual copies of full production datasets on the same infrastructure as the production workloads. Teams can work in parallel and can easily rollback to older versions with VM-level snapshots or clones. Such flexibility can shorten the development lifecycle and improve software quality.

• Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery. Every IT administrator cringes at the thought of recovering their infrastructure and data after a disaster. HCI solutions can alleviate some of that apprehension. Some solutions support metro, or stretch, clustering with high availability between two physically separated sites.

The DCIG 2017–18 Hyperconverged Infrastructure Appliance Buyer’s Guide accomplishes the following objectives:

• Provides an objective, third party evaluation of hyperconverged infrastructure appliances that evaluates their features from an end user’s viewpoint

• Includes recommendations on how to best use this Buyer’s Guide and the products contained in it

• Ranks the features on each product based upon the criteria that matter most to end users so they can quickly know which products are the most appropriate for them and under what conditions

• Provides a standardized one-page data sheet for each product so end users can do quick comparisons of the features that are supported and not supported by each product




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The Purpose of This Buyer’s Guide

DCIG Buyer’s Guide Objective

• A DCIG Buyer’s Guide compares products, not companies

• A DCIG Buyer’s Guide provides actionable information

• A DCIG Buyer’s Guides accelerates product research

The Value This DCIG Buyer’s Guide Creates for Buyers

Like prior DCIG Buyer’s Guides, the DCIG 2017–18

Hyperconverged Infrastructure Appliance Buyer’s Guide does the heavy lifting for organizations as they look to purchase an HCI solution by:

• Identifying available products in a marketplace

• Delineating the features that are supported

• Weighting these features according to what end users consider most important

• Ranking each product

• Creating a standardized one-page data sheet for each product

The end result is that the DCIG 2017–18 Hyperconverged

Infrastructure Appliance Buyer’s Guide drives time and cost out of the product selection process by enabling prospec-tive buyers to do “at-a-glance” comparisons between many different products. By identifying a shortlist of products that meet their specific needs, prospective purchasers can focus their product evaluation energies on those products and move more quickly to the competitive bid process.

Note that this Buyer’s Guide is not intended to be a substi-tute for bringing individual products in-house for testing. In-house testing or proof-of-concept implementations should still be done, if possible, since every product will perform differently under different application workloads and data center environments. We hope you find that this Buyer’s Guide meets its intended purpose in your environment.

How to Use this Buyer’s GuideThis Buyer’s Guide is intended to help users accelerate their product research and selection process—driving cost out of the research process while simultaneously increasing confidence in the results. The purpose of this Buyer’s Guide

is NOT intended to tell users exactly which product(s) to purchase. Rather, it is to guide them in coming up with a list of competitive products that have comparable features that meet their specific needs.

Features, as displayed on each product data sheet, repre-sent the opinion of DCIG. DCIG encourages and strongly recommends every organization verify the functionality of the features that are of particular interest to them before making a buying decision. To help in that decision, this Buyer’s Guide gives organizations a sense of how prod-ucts compare with each other, as well as giving additional insight into what other product offerings are available on the market and the specific features they offer.

DCIG recommends that companies use this Buyer’s Guide in the following seven ways:

1. Eliminate the painstaking research normally

associated with identifying a shortlist of products

that meet their needs. This Buyer’s Guide evaluates products from twenty-four (24) different products from five (5) different vendors. Each product is ranked Recommended or Excellent based on standard deviation ranges. More than 100 different features were evaluated, so organizations only need to look at the rankings and features to come up with a shortlist for consideration.

2. Do apples-to-apples comparisons of products from

different vendors. It behooves an organization to get competitive bids from multiple vendors. After all, when

they compete, you win! But that tactic only works well when organizations know that they are receiving competitive bids on products that are roughly compa-rable. Using this Buyer’s Guide, organizations can do a better job of accomplishing that objective.

3. Separate the apples from the oranges. Just as important as doing apples-to-apples comparisons is identifying when an orange is thrown into the mix. Sometimes it is very difficult for an organization to know if it is truly getting a good deal when bids come in from vendors that include different products. Now organiza-tions can refer to the rankings of each product on this guide so they know when they are getting a good deal, a great deal or just a “so-so” one.

4. Gain perspective on how products from less

well-known vendors compare against established

and better-known brands. There’s a built-in level of




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comfort when buying products from well-known vendors. There’s also a built-in resistance to buying products from vendors that are perceived as unknown quantities. This Buyer’s Guide helps to remove some of that apprehension. Using this Buyer’s Guide, organiza-tions can see how these products stack up.

5. Normalize complex terminology. Every segment across industries has a proclivity to adopt acronyms and jargon that is specific to it. This Buyer’s Guide sifts through the acronyms and jargon and then normalizes these terms, providing a foundation for meaningful comparisons. Definitions for these normalized terms are provided in the Glossary in this Guide.

6. Take advantage of standardized data sheets

to quickly compare products side-by-side. The product data sheets available from the different vendors are rarely laid out in the same way or contain the same information. Some vendors even have data sheet formats that vary from product to product within their own portfolio. This Buyer’s Guide tackles this problem by creating a standard, easy-to-read data sheet for every product. In this way, product data sheets for individual products can be printed out and laid down side by side so that the features on them can be quickly compared.

7. Help justify buying recommendations to business

teams. An overall ranking of Recommended or Excellent is included at the top of every product data sheet. This overall ranking summarizes in a single word how feature rich a product is compared to the other products in the Buyer’s Guide.

DisclosuresOver the last few years the general trend in the US has been for both large and boutique analyst firms to receive some or all of their revenue from vendors.

DCIG is no different in this respect as it also receives payment for the different services it performs for vendors. The services that DCIG provides include blogging, battle cards, competitive advantage reports, customer valida-tions, product reviews, executive white papers, white papers and special reports.

In the interest of transparency, a number of the vendors included in this DCIG Buyer’s Guide are or have been DCIG

clients. This is not to imply that their products were given preferential treatment in the Buyer’s Guide. All it means is that DCIG had more knowledge of their products so that DCIG could consider their product for inclusion in this Buyer’s Guide.

In that vein, there are a number of important facts to keep in mind when considering the information contained in this Buyer’s Guide and its merit.

• No vendor paid DCIG any fee to research this topic or arrive at pre-determined conclusions

• DCIG did not guarantee any vendor that its product would be included in this Buyer’s Guide

• DCIG did not imply or guarantee that a specific product would receive a preferential ranking in this Buyer’s Guide, before or after completion of research

• All research was based upon publicly available informa-tion, information provided by the vendor, and/or the expertise of those evaluating the information

• No negative inferences should be drawn against any vendor or product not covered in this Buyer’s Guide.

• It is a misuse of the Buyer’s Guide to compare products included in it against products not included.

Because of the number of features analyzed and weighed, there was no way for DCIG to accurately predict at the outset how individual products would end up ranking. DCIG wants to emphasize that no vendor was privy to how DCIG weighed individual features. In every case the vendor only found out the rankings of its product(s) after the analysis was complete.

Inclusion and Exclusion CriteriaThe inclusion and exclusion of specific products in this Buyer’s Guide is based on the follow criteria:

• Must be available (orderable) as a single SKU and includes its own hardware and software

• Must be marketed as a hyperconverged appliance

• Must support at least one hypervisor (XEN, Hyper-V, VMware, KVM, etc)

• Must provide compute and storage in the same infrastructure solution (i.e. the appliance can host multiple virtual machines and use local direct attached storage as the storage layer)




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• Must not require an external storage (i.e. SAN/NAS) appliance

• Must cluster nodes together

• Must support a centralized management and reporting structure

• Must provide data protection features

• There must be sufficient information available to DCIG to make meaningful decisions. DCIG makes a good faith effort to reach out and obtain information from as many storage providers as possible. However, products may be excluded because of a lack of sufficient reliable data

• Must be formally announced and/or generally available for purchase as of April 28, 2017. A cut-off date had to be put in place or this Buyer’s Guide would never be published

Ultimately, it is the professional judgment of the analysts

working on each DCIG Buyer’s Guide whether or not a

particular model meets the inclusion criteria.

The Eight-Step Process Used to Rank the ProductsTo rank each product included in this Buyer’s Guide, DCIG went through an eight-step process to come to the most objective conclusion possible.

1. DCIG established which features would be

evaluated and which ones would not. Prior to selecting the features which would be evaluated, DCIG quantified, then “normalized” the list of available features such that a common name for each feature was established. In cases where a feature could not be objectively defined or understood, it was excluded from consideration.

2. The features were grouped into five (5) general

categories. The features to be evaluated were grouped into five categories: Hardware, Management, Software, Data Protection and Support.

3. DCIG developed a survey to capture the feature

data and completed a survey for each vendor’s

product(s). DCIG then sent the survey(s) to each

vendor for verification. Each vendor was invited to

review their data and respond with any corrections

or edits to the DCIG-completed survey(s). ). In every case, each vendor had the opportunity to review and respond to any DCIG-completed survey.

4. DCIG identified a list of products that met the DCIG

definition for an “Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Appliance” based on the inclusion/exclusion criteria.

5. DCIG weighted each feature to establish a scoring

rubric. The weighting of each feature was done by a team of DCIG research analysts. The weightings were used to reflect if a feature was supported and poten-tially how useful and/or important the feature was to end users.

6. Each product’s features were scored based on

information gathered in the surveys. Features were marked as either “supported” or “unsupported/

undetermined” and then scored accordingly. Rankings were finalized after any updates from vendors had been entered and the review period expired.

7. Products were ranked using standard scoring

techniques. One of the goals of this Buyer’s Guide is to establish clear lines of differentiation with conclusions that are arrived at objectively. To accomplish this goal, the mean score for all products was first determined and then the standard deviation. DCIG developed an overall ranking for each product based on where that product’s overall score fit into standard deviation ranges.

8. Product feature data review worksheets were

created and sent to the vendors for review before

publication. Each data sheet included in this published version of the Buyer’s Guide is derived from a feature data review worksheet that was sent to the vendor for its review and feedback. In every case, each vendor had an opportunity to review and update the content included on its respective data sheet(s).

Due to the large number of product features that DCIG evaluated, only a subset of the collected data could be included on the data sheets. The feature data on the data sheets was selected based on the following criteria: 1) the most variability, 2) the greatest scoring weight, and 3) of the greatest interest to prospective purchasers. The full set of product feature data may be accessed in the DCIG Competitive Intelligence Portal available through DCIG’s website: www.dcig.com.



http://www.dcig.com


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DCIG Comments — The Business Value of Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Streamlined Infrastructure

HCI is more streamlined than converged infrastructure (CI) solutions. Converged infrastructure products are comprised of distinct components (often from different vendors) integrated together with a management and orchestration software layer as a single package and sold as a single SKU. These disparate components can be separated and used as stand-alone appliances. HCI differs from CI that the individual components (networking, storage, compute and manage-ment) cannot be extracted and operated independently.

IT professionals realize the business value that HCI solu-tions provide, not only to the bottom line of their budgets, but also value of reduced complexities in IT deployments and ongoing operations.

Traditional server virtualization and storage systems can take weeks or even months to deploy and to be ready for use. HCI reduces these times down to hours or days. HCI also simplifies expansion, as one only needs to add a node to increase the processing resources, network connectiv-ity and storage capacity. These flexible, scalable solutions easily integrate into any data center providing a virtualized “all-in-one” platform capable of running most any workload.

Automated Provisioning

Increasingly, organizations employ IT generalists to manage the IT infrastructure including server virtualization, network-ing, storage and data protection rather than specialized administrators for each discipline. HCI solutions that provide a high level of automated management and/or policy-based provisioning tools are ideal for IT generalists. HCI solutions reduce or eliminate repetitive administrative tasks and shield administrators from being overwhelmed with configuring and maintaining multiple products. Automated provisioning accelerates workflow processes, minimizes configuration errors and in turn, frees IT staff to focus on higher value activities.

Incremental and Customized Scaling

HCI solutions provide incremental scalability by simply adding an HCI node or appliance to a running system.1

Nodes and/or appliances can be added non-disruptively, expanding the storage capacity and processing resources in a single step. As organizations expand HCI use to a broader range of applications with varying compute and storage requirements some vendors have begun to offer compute-optimized and storage-optimized nodes. This lets organizations tailor the HCI environment based on the needs of the business.

Incremental and customized scaling minimizes the over-provisioning common in traditional IT infrastructure deployments. This generates bottom line saving, allowing organizations to:

• Keep More Money. Businesses purchase only the resources required. If and when expansion is necessary, new nodes/appliances can easily be added to the HCI architecture.

• Save More Time. IT staff can focus on business critical tasks rather wasting time and effort provisioning equip-ment that will not be immediately utilized.

• Conserve More Data Center Resources. Over-provisioning wastes data center resources such as rack space, power and cooling. HCI solutions are provisioned to meet today’s needs and are easily expanded when required.

Hypervisor Flexibility

All of the vendors in this Buyer’s Guide support the VMware ESXi hypervisor. Most also support other hypervisors such as Microsoft Hyper-V and Linux KVM. This allows organi-zations to select the hypervisor which they are the most comfortable, which best fits into their existing environment and allows them to better control the costs associated with their HCI deployment.

Hypervisor Percentage Support

VMware ESXi 100%

Microsoft Hyper-V 52%

Linux KVM 43%

1. DCIG defines the term “node” as a hardware component that provides compute, storage and networking resources. The term “appliance” refers to a rack-mountable hardware chassis. An appliance may contain one or more nodes.




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Data protection

Data protection is essential for every organization. Inaccessible or corrupted data can have serious financial and legal ramifi-cations. HCI solutions implement a variety of methodologies and capabilities to ensure that data is protected.

• Backup software. Organizations may be able to eliminate third-party backup software by utilizing HCI data protection features, including VM-centric backup software that integrates with the other data protection features of the HCI solution to quickly and cost-effectively protect VMs. Automation may protect VMs that might otherwise have gone unprotected. All the HCI solutions in this guide also integrate with 3rd party backup software, enabling them to fit into existing data protection schemes.

• RAID/mirroring. RAID or mirroring distributes data across a set of disk drives protecting against isolated (limited) local hardware failures and human error. There are several standard RAID levels each providing a different level of fault tolerance and performance.

• Erasure coding. Erasure coding takes RAID to the next level. Erasure coding splits data into chunks that are encoded with a parity value and then stored across the solution. Erasure coding utilizes disk capacity more efficiently than traditional RAID and replication technolo-gies to achieve the same or better level of protection.

• Single-site replication. Duplicating data at a single site provides redundancy in the event of a system-wide failure and quickens recovery in these scenarios since the data resides locally.

• Off-site replication. As the name implies, off-site replication duplicates data to an off-site (remote) location. This enhances protection against catastrophic campus outages or regional disasters.

Simple Adoption in the Enterprise

Deploying new hardware and software in a data center can be time-consuming. HCI solutions simplify adoption by providing a pre-configured, pre-tested solution which combines compute, storage and networking hardware with virtualization, data protection and cluster management soft-ware. As such, businesses deploying HCI can quickly and confidently begin moving workloads to the solution without a lengthy integration testing cycle.

Feature Areas Where DCIG Expects to See ImprovementHCI solutions are being used to address a growing range of needs within organizations. This pushes vendors to balance providing a strong feature set and powerful hardware with keeping costs down. DCIG expects this ongoing tension to yield improvements in the following feature areas.

Resource-Optimized NodesHCI solutions are built on the premise of building-block scalability. These blocks are often required to be exact or near exact duplicates (differing only in CPU version and drive capacities). This can lead to over-provisioning of one resource and under-provisioning of another. To address these concerns, some vendors have begun offering compute-optimized nodes or capacity-optimized nodes providing control to IT administrators to target expansion of constrained resources. DCIG expects more vendors will offer resource optimized nodes in the coming months.

Rapid Adoption of NVMe HCI architecture and NVMe are ideally suited to each other, especially in designs where each node supports no more than six drives. The low latency and low CPU overhead of NVMe enable each HCI node to do significantly more work. These factors apply equally to NVMe flash memory devices and to other next-generation non-volatile memory technolo-gies such as 3D XPoint.

Next-generation EthernetNext-generation Ethernet adapters offer data rates up to 200 Gbps, offload NVMf processing, and make all the NVMe drives in the HCI cluster available to all nodes at near-local speeds. While 10 GbE is supported by the HCI nodes today, we expect to see appliances equipped with 25, 50 and 100 GbE entering the market soon.

Integration with Existing InfrastructureTo avoid HCI solutions being seen as yet another data center silo, HCI vendors should integrate seamlessly with existing storage and compute resources. Presenting HCI storage to existing servers, or in the other direction, extend-ing HCI management to include legacy storage systems would reduce integration concerns.

Performance and PricingTwo factors that strongly influence buying decisions are performance and cost. Therefore, it may come as




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a surprise to those who look at this DCIG 2017–18

Hyperconverged Infrastructure Appliance Buyer’s Guide to see no performance bench marks and no pricing informa-tion. There are two core reasons why performance and pricing information are not included in this Buyer’s Guide.

First, performance results vary according to data center environments, the data being stored, and implementation decisions. Introducing any type of performance metric would only result in the analysis in this Buyer’s Guide becoming more subjective, not less.

Second, this Buyer’s Guide is intended to provide a point-in-time snapshot of the HCI marketplace. If DCIG had tried to test and establish performance bench marks for all of these products, the next generation of products could well be available before the testing was completed, making this Buyer’s Guide obsolete before it ever saw the light of day.

As for pricing, many factors influence final price including capacity purchased, services, extended warranties, nego-tiations, etc. These factors differ for every vendor and for every enterprise.

DCIG recognizes that price and performance are relevant and often key considerations when buying a product. However, it is almost impossible for a third party like DCIG to objectively measure these features on a large scale. Therefore, evaluating these factors is a part of the buying process that is still best left to end users.

DCIG Observations

Recommended Ranking

Products earning the Recommended ranking include the Pivot3 Acuity X-Series, Dell EMC VxRail Series, Dell EMC XC6320-6, HPE SimpliVity OmniCube CN-5400, CN-3400 and CN-2400, Nutanix NX-8000, NX-6000, NX-3000 and NX-1000 Series. These products are generally distin-guished from products ranked Excellent by the following characteristics:

• 70% of the Recommended products scale to at least 64 nodes in a cluster compared to 46% of products ranked Excellent

• Average 25 TB/RU (terabyte per rack unit) of raw all-flash capacity, more than 2.5X the average of Excellent products

Pivot3’s Acuity X-Series enables enterprise workload consoli-dation by integrating NVMe flash and rich QoS technology from its 2016 acquisition of NexGen. Acuity scales to 12 hybrid or 16 all-flash nodes—and up to 516.8 TB of raw all-flash capacity—per virtual Performance Group (vPG). Pivot3 supports unlimited vPGs per cluster.

Pivot3’s patented Scalar Erasure Coding technology utilizes storage capacity much more efficiently than traditional RAID and replication technologies, delivering storage efficiency of up to 94%. Optional vGPU cards enhance VDI performance and consolidation ratios.

The Dell EMC VxRail Series consists of five different plat-forms designed to address different use cases. The VxRail products utilize VMware virtualization technologies includ-ing Virtual SAN. Four of the five platforms are available as hybrid or all-flash configurations. The largest all-flash platform scales to 2.9 PB in a 64 node maximum scale-out configuration. Each 1U or 2U appliance contains one or four nodes. The VxRail Series offers erasure coding, deduplication and compression data services on the all-flash configurations. With VSAN 6.2, the product now provides stretch clustering, allowing nodes to be in separate physical locations.

The Dell EMC XC6320-6 is 2U, four-node appliance powered by Nutanix software. Dell EMC positions the XC6320 for high-density compute and storage environ-ments, service providers and private cloud deployments. Each all-flash node consists dual Xeon processors and 6 x 3.8 TB SSD drives giving the appliance a maximum raw all-flash capacity of 91.2 TB. The Dell EMC XC6320-6 offers REST API for automated management and supports multiple hypervisors including Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Simplivity was acquired by HPE in February 2017. The HPE SimpliVity OmniCube CN-5400, CN-3400 and CN-2400 have a maximum raw storage capacity of 25.6 TB, 21.6 TB and 10.4 TB per hybrid appliance, and 22.4 TB, 10.6 and 8 TB in all-flash configurations. The OmniCube scales to eight appliances for a maximum all-flash capacity of 179.2 TB. The latest OmniStack software release builds on existing data protection capabilities by adding support for multi-node stretch clustering and SQL Server application-aware backups. SimpliVity appliances utilize OmniStack Accelerator Cards to offload and accelerate deduplication and compression operations.




11

The Nutanix NX-8000, NX-6000, NX-3000, and NX-1000 models all earned the Recommended ranking in this year’s Buyer’s Guide. Nutanix claims unlimited scaling. A 64-node NX-8000 cluster provides almost 3 PB of raw all-flash capacity. Nutanix products support multiple hypervisors including VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and its own KVM-based Acropolis hypervisor. The latest release of the Nutanix AOS now includes native file services through AFS (Acropolis File Services), the Prism self-service portal and ESXi management within Prism.

Excellent Ranking

The fourteen (14) products that achieved an Excellent ranking are Pivot3 HCI Blades, All-Flash and Hybrid prod-ucts, Dell EMC XC730 Series and XC630-10, HPE Hyper Converged 380 VMware Platform System Standard, 250 for Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard and 250 for VMware Platform System Standard, HPE SimpliVity CN-1400 and OmniStack, Lenovo HX7510, HX5510, HX3000 Series and HX2710-E. These products generally share the following characteristics, with a some exceptions:

• Support more than one hypervisor

• Support a direct connection for cloud migrations

• Support stretch clustering

Pivot3 HCI Blades, HCI All-Flash and HCI Hybrid models have similar management and operational characteristics as the Recommended Acuity X-Series with the exception of NVMe flash and QoS support. The HCI Blade chassis utilizes 16 half-width blades for a compute-dense HCI solution supporting up to 51.2 TB of raw all-flash capacity. The HCI Flash scales to nearly 500 TB, while the HCI Hybrid scales to over 1.5 PB of raw capacity.

The Dell EMC XC730 Series and XC630-10 share many similarities with their XC6320-6 sibling. These appliances fill a spectrum of use-cases including VDI, storage-heavy workloads and performance-intensive transactional work-loads. The Dell EMC XC systems run Nutanix software and provide broad hypervisor support including VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Acropolis. These products offer all-flash or hybrid configurations, the largest provid-ing 60 TB raw capacity per node.

HPE Hyper Converged 380 and 250 products are available in hybrid and all flash configurations. The HC380 is available in three workload configurations: Virtualization, CloudSystem and VDI. A GPU card can be added to enhance VDI perfor-mance. It supports up to 40.2 TB of usable all-flash capacity per node. The HC380 scales to 16 nodes. The HC250 supports 32 nodes with VMware ESXi and 16 nodes with Microsoft Hyper-V. HPE HC250 provides VM and applica-tion consistent snapshots and synchronous replication for multi-site high availability. It provides 9.6 TB of raw all-flash capacity per node, or 38.4 TB in a 4-node appliance.

HPE SimpliVity OmniCube CN-1400 is the entry level model of the series. Like its larger OmniCube siblings, the CN-1400 is powered by the OmniStack operating software. The CN-1400 is available in a hybrid configura-tion with an effective capacity of 6 TB per node.

The HPE SimpliVity OmniStack operating system is pack-aged with several OEM hardware vendors including HPE, Cisco, Dell EMC and Lenovo. This option benefits orga-nizations wanting to minimize vendor lock-in or that have a preferred server vendor, or where getting a new vendor approved by the purchasing department would add many months to the acquisition process. The OmniStack OS provides an enhanced optimization engine identifying VM locations for workload balancing, and stretched clustering that enables deployments to span multiple locations.

Lenovo HX7510, HX5510, HX3000 Series and HX2710-E utilize Lenovo hardware and the Nutanix OS. The HX7510 is a 2U, single-node appliance positioned for high-performance enterprise databases and applications. A 64-node cluster scales to nearly 3 PB of raw storage capacity. The Lenovo HX Series supports Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESXi, and the built-in Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor. Existing Lenovo customers can leverage XClarity, Lenovo’s hardware systems management application.




12

HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE APPLIANCE RANKINGS




13

RANKING PRODUCT

R E C O M M E N D E D Pivot3 Acuity X-Series *

Dell EMC VxRail Series

Dell EMC XC6320-6

HPE SimpliVity OmniCube CN-5400



Nutanix NX-8000 Series




E X C E L L E N T Pivot3 HCI Blades *

Pivot3 HCI All-Flash *

Pivot3 HCI Hybrid *

Dell EMC XC730 Series

Dell EMC XC630-10

HPE Hyper Converged 380 VMware Platform System Standard

HPE Hyper Converged 250 for VMware Platform System Standard

HPE Hyper Converged 250 for Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard


HPE SimpliVity OmniStack **

Lenovo HX7510

Lenovo HX5510

Lenovo HX3000 Series

Lenovo HX2710-E

* The licensing provider is listed at the beginning of each ranking category in which its products are included. One should not draw any negative inferences about any other products included in that ranking.

** OmniStack utilizes Cisco UCS, Dell EMC PowerEdge, HPE, Huawei, or Lenovo servers

OVERALL RANKINGS




14

HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE PRODUCTS



OVERALL RANK

The DCIG Competitive Intelligence Portal contains additional data elements that are reflected in the overall ranking, but which are not shown on this data sheet. SUPPORTED UNDETERMINED / UNSUPPORTED

15

NO FEEDBACK WAS RECEIVED FROM THE PROVIDER. ALL INFORMATION WAS SOLELY SOURCED BY DCIG.

SUPPORT

Technician Onsite with 4-hour Guaranteed Response

Proactive Remediation Based on Fault Data

Proactive Intervention Based on Analytics

Standard Hardware Warranty 1 Year

Standard Flash Media Warranty 1 Year

DATA PROTECTION

Near-zero Overhead Snapshots

Synchronous Replication

VM-level Replication

3rd Party Backup SW Options TOTAL # OF 15 3

Erasure Coding: Always-on / Batch /

RAID

Native Backup & Recovery Software

Native Migration to Cloud: Amazon / Google / Azure / /

FIPS 140-2

Backup Granularity: Datastore / VM-level /

SOFTWARE

SW Only Deployment Option

WAN Optimization

In-line Deduplication / In-line Compression /

Auto Tiering

Hypervisors: KVM / Hyper-V / VMware / /

Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI

Certified for: Hadoop / Microsoft Exchange / Splunk / /

Data Migrations from: iSCSI / NFS /

NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /

Concurrent SAN & NAS

MANAGEMENT

Management: System Center / vCenter / Proprietary / /

Policy-based Provisioning: API / SMI-S /

Quotas per Directory and/or User

QoS: User-defined Guaranteed Maximums

QoS: Predefined Service Levels

3rd Party Storage Array Virtualization

HARDWARE

Compute Nodes per Appliance MAX 4

Compute Nodes per Cluster MAX 64

CPU Cores per Node MAX 32

DRAM per Node MAX 512 GB

Hybrid / All-flash Configuration /

Raw Hybrid Capacity per Appliance MAX 40 TB

Raw Flash Capacity per Appliance MAX 76.8 TB

Raw Hybrid Density per Appliance MAX 20 TB/RU

Raw Flash Density per Appliance MAX 38.4 TB/RU

10 GbE Network Connections per Node MAX 4

RECOMMENDED

Dell EMC VxRail Series

This Buyer’s Guide Edition is licensed to Pivot3 with unlimited and unrestricted distribution rights through May 31, 2018.©2075 DCIG, LLC. All rights reserved. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. The information, product recommendations and opinions made by DCIG, LLC are based upon public information and from sources that DCIG, LLC believes to be accurate and reliable.

OVERALL RANK


16


DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SUPPORT






SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


MANAGEMENT







HARDWARE




DRAM per Node MAX 1,536 GB


Raw Hybrid Capacity per Appliance MAX 19.2 TB

Raw Flash Capacity per Appliance MAX 16 TB

Raw Hybrid Density per Appliance MAX 19.2 TB/RU

Raw Flash Density per Appliance MAX 16 TB/RU


EXCELLENT

Dell EMC XC630-10


OVERALL RANK


17


DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SUPPORT






SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


MANAGEMENT







HARDWARE











RECOMMENDED

Dell EMC XC6320-6


OVERALL RANK


18


DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SUPPORT






SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


MANAGEMENT







HARDWARE







Raw Flash Capacity per Appliance MAX


Raw Flash Density per Appliance MAX


EXCELLENT

Dell EMC XC730 Series


OVERALL RANK


19

DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SUPPORT






SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


EXCELLENT

MANAGEMENT







HARDWARE











HPE Hyper Converged 250 for Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard


OVERALL RANK


20

EXCELLENT

SUPPORT






DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


MANAGEMENT







HARDWARE













OVERALL RANK


21

DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SUPPORT




Standard Hardware Warranty 3 Years


SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


MANAGEMENT







HARDWARE











EXCELLENT



OVERALL RANK


22


EXCELLENT


MANAGEMENT







HARDWARE











SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SUPPORT




Standard Hardware Warranty 90 Days

Standard Flash Media Warranty 90 Days


OVERALL RANK RECOMMENDED


23


MANAGEMENT







DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


SUPPORT






HARDWARE















24


HARDWARE











SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


SUPPORT






DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


MANAGEMENT











25


HARDWARE











DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SUPPORT






SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


MANAGEMENT









OVERALL RANK


26


DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SUPPORT






SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


MANAGEMENT







HARDWARE











EXCELLENT

HPE SimpliVity OmniStack


OVERALL RANK


27


EXCELLENT

SUPPORT





Standard Flash Media Warranty 2 Years

DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


MANAGEMENT







HARDWARE











Lenovo HX2710-E


OVERALL RANK


28


EXCELLENT

DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SUPPORT






SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


MANAGEMENT







HARDWARE











Lenovo HX3000 Series


OVERALL RANK


29


MANAGEMENT







SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


SUPPORT






DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


HARDWARE











EXCELLENT

Lenovo HX5510


OVERALL RANK


30


MANAGEMENT







SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


SUPPORT






DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


HARDWARE











EXCELLENT

Lenovo HX7510


OVERALL RANK


31


SUPPORT






DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


RECOMMENDED

MANAGEMENT







SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


HARDWARE















32


DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


HARDWARE











MANAGEMENT







SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


SUPPORT








OVERALL RANK


33


RECOMMENDED

DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SUPPORT






SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


MANAGEMENT







HARDWARE















34


DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


HARDWARE











MANAGEMENT







SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


SUPPORT










35

DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SUPPORT




Standard Hardware Warranty None

Standard Flash Media Warranty None

SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


MANAGEMENT







HARDWARE











Pivot3 Acuity X-Series


OVERALL RANK


36

Pivot3 HCI All-FlashEXCELLENT

HARDWARE






Raw Hybrid Capacity per Appliance MAX


Raw Hybrid Density per Appliance MAX



MANAGEMENT







SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SUPPORT







OVERALL RANK


37

SUPPORT






DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


MANAGEMENT







HARDWARE











EXCELLENT

Pivot3 HCI Blades


OVERALL RANK


38

Pivot3 HCI HybridEXCELLENT

MANAGEMENT







HARDWARE







Raw Flash Capacity per Appliance MAX 800 GB


Raw Flash Density per Appliance MAX .4 TB/RU


DATA PROTECTION






RAID



FIPS 140-2


SOFTWARE


WAN Optimization


Auto Tiering


Microsoft ODX

VMware VAAI



NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0 /


SUPPORT








39

APPENDICESAppendix A: Definitions, Explanations and Terminology

Appendix B: Vendor Contact Information

Appendix C: Author Contact Information




A-1

Appendix A—Definitions, Explanations and Terminology

HardwareCompute Nodes per Appliance MAX

Indicates the number of nodes in a single physical appliance or chassis, typically ranging from 1 to 4. A node consists of a central processing unit (CPU), memory, hard-disk drives (HDDs), and/or solid-state drives (SSDs).

Compute Nodes per Cluster MAX

Indicates the maximum number of compute nodes in the largest supported configuration.

CPU Cores per Node MAX

Indicates the maximum number of CPU cores supported in a single node.

DRAM per Node MAX

Indicates the maximum amount of DRAM per node, expressed in gigabytes (GB).

Hybrid / All-flash ConfigurationIndicates support for the two types of node configura-tions. Hybrid—a node which supports both HDDs and SSDs (storage or caching) and All-flash—a node which supports SSDs only.


Indicates the maximum raw hybrid capacity in terabytes supported by a single physical appliance or chassis (may contain more than one node).


Indicates the maximum raw all-flash capacity in terabytes supported by a single physical appliance or chassis (may contain more than one node).


Indicates the maximum amount of hybrid storage that this product can provide per standard EIA rack unit. This measure of storage density is presented in terms of terabytes per rack unit (TB/RU).

Definitions, Explanations and TerminologyThis section contains brief definitions and/or explanations of the terms used and assumptions made when developing the data sheets found in the DCIG 2017-18 Hyperconverged Infrastructure Array Buyer’s Guide. These terms are in the same order as they appear on the individual data sheets.


Indicates the maximum amount of all-flash storage that this product can provide per standard EIA rack unit. This measure of storage density is presented in terms of terabytes per rack unit (TB/RU).

10GbE Network Connections per Node MAX

Indicates the total number of 10GbE connections supported by a node.

Data ProtectionNear-zero Overhead Snapshots

Indicates support for near-zero overhead snapshots.

Synchronous ReplicationIndicates support for synchronous replication. Write I/Os need to be received at the primary or source and then copied and written to the secondary, or target, with the write confirmed by both as complete before processing can continue.

VM-level ReplicationIndicates support for VM-level replication.

3rd Party Backup SW Options TOTAL # OF 15

Indicates the number of 3rd party backup software products supported by the product. The specific products supported are available by accessing the DCIG Competitive Analysis Portal.

Erasure Coding: Always-on / BatchIndicates support for erasure coding. Always-on: Each data packet is processed by the erasure coding function on ingest then written to persistent storage. Batch: Data is initially written to persistent storage, then at scheduled intervals, data is processed by the erasure coding function.

RAIDIndicates support for RAID.




A-2

Appendix A—Definitions, Explanations and Terminology (continued)

Native Backup & Recovery SoftwareIndicates support of native backup and recovery software without the need to install a third-party product for this functionality.

Native Migration to Cloud: Amazon / Google / AzureIndicates built-in support for migrating data to the Amazon, Google and/or Microsoft Azure public clouds.

FIPS 140-2Indicates if the product supports the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) Publication 140-2, a U.S. government computer security standard that accredits cryptographic modules.

Backup Granularity: Datastore / VM-levelIndicates the granularity of backups implemented on the product. Datastore—backups are performed per Datastore. VM-level—backups are performed per VM.

ManagementManagement: System Center / vCenter / Proprietary

Indicates support for specific hypervisor management consoles: Microsoft System Center, vCenter, and Proprietary.

Policy-based Provisioning: API / SMI-SIndicates support for automated policy-based provision-ing via an application programming interface (API) or via the SMI-S standard. Policy-based provisioning uses pre-defined parameters that are executed automatically without requiring manual intervention.

Quotas per Directory and/or UserIndicates support for the assigning and enforcing of Directory and/or User storage quotas.

QoS: User-defined Guaranteed MaximumsIndicates if quality of service rules may be based on user-defined guaranteed maximums. These may include maximums for IOPs, bandwidth and/or response times for VMs, LUNs or Volumes.

QoS: Predefined Service LevelsIndicates if quality of service rules may be based on the assignment of VMs, LUNs, or Volumes to predefined service levels (i.e. Gold, Silver, Bronze).

3rd Party Storage Array VirtualizationIndicates whether the array supports virtualization of third party storage arrays, bringing the 3rd party storage arrays under the management of the product.

SoftwareSW Only Deployment Option

Indicates if the product is also available as a software-only SKU, enabling the licensee to implement the HCI solution on customer-provided hardware.

WAN OptimizationIndicates if the product implements technologies that maximize the efficiency of data flow across a wide area network (WAN).

In-line Deduplication / In-line CompressionIndicates support for in-line deduplication and/or in-line compression In-line deduplication removes any identical (duplicate) blocks of data before it is saved to disk. In-line compression is a feature that reduces the amount of data stored by encoding data using fewer bits than the original data by eliminating statistical redundancy before it is written to disk

Auto TieringAutomated tiering places data on the appropriate tier of storage within the product based upon policies that are either built into the software, set by the storage adminis-trator, or some combination of both.

Hypervisors: KVM / Hyper-V / VMwareIndicates support for the specified hypervisors.

Microsoft ODXIndicate if the solution supports Microsoft ODX (offloaded data transfer), a technology which enables direct data transfers within or between storage devices, avoiding the need to send data back and forth to a host.

VMware VAAIIndicates if the model supports VAAI, a group of propri-etary application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by VMWare’s vSphere platform which allow certain I/O tasks to be offloaded to array hardware. VAAI first appeared in vSphere 4.1 and was expanded in 5.0. The specific elements supported by each product are available by accessing the DCIG Competitive Intelligence Portal.




A-3

Appendix A—Definitions, Explanations and Terminology (continued)

Certified for: Hadoop / Microsoft Exchange / Splunk

Indicates that the product is certified to support Hadoop, Microsoft Exchange and/or Splunk.

Data Migrations from: iSCSI / NFSIndicates the product supports the use of iSCSI or NFS protocols to migrate data to the product.

NFS 4.0 / SMB 3.0Indicates support for the NFS 4.0 and SMB 3.0 file protocols.

Concurrent SAN & NASIndicates the ability for the product to communicate with applications using both block (SAN) and network file system (NAS) protocols at the same time.

SupportTechnician Onsite with 4-hour Guaranteed Response

Indicates if the vendor offers a support option that guarantees a technician will be onsite within four hours of a support ticket being created.

Proactive Remediation Based on Fault Data Indicates if the vendor monitors fault data to proactively address faults in order to avoid or minimize down time.

Proactive Intervention Based on Analytics Indicates if the vendor performs storage analytics based on data collected from products in the field in order to intervene directly or provide proactive guidance to address potential problems, enable optimal perfor-mance and uptime, and facilitate capacity planning.

Standard Hardware WarrantyIndicates the length of the standard hardware warranty included with the purchase of the product.

Standard Flash Media WarrantyIndicates the length of standard flash media warranty included with the purchase of the product.




B-1

Appendix B—Vendor Contact Information

Dell EMC1 Dell WayRound Rock, TX 78682Phone: +1.800.671.3355Website: www.dellemc.com

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE)3000 Hanover StreetPalo Alto, CA 94304Phone: +1.866.625.0242Website: www.hpe.com

Lenovo1009 Think PlaceMorrisville, NC 27560Phone: +1.855.253.6686Website: www.lenovo.com

Nutanix1740 Technology Drive, Suite 150San Jose, CA 95110Phone: +1.855.NUTANIXWebsite: www.nutanix.com

Pivot3221 W. Sixth Street, Suite 750Austin, Texas 78701Phone: +1.866.625.0242Website: www.pivot3.com

SimpliVity Acquired by HPE

Vendor Contact Information



http://www.dellemc.com

http://www.hpe.com

http://www.lenovo.com

http://www.nutanix.com

http://ww.pivot3.com


C-1

Appendix C—DCIG Contact Information

AUTHORSCharley McMasterSenior [email protected]

Ken ClippertonLead Analyst, Buyer’s [email protected]

MEDIA CONTACTKari SchoenVice President, [email protected]

DCIG, LLC7511 Madison StreetOmaha, NE 68127+1.844.324.4552www.dcig.com

DCIG Contact Information



mailto:[email protected]



http://www.dcig.com

Documents

2015-16 HYPER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE BUYER’S GUIDE€¦ · Granular scalability and simplified management yield ongoing benefits in agility and IT staff efficiency. At a minimum,