Gartner Analyzes Key Vendors in the 2024 Market Guide for Full-Stack HCI Software: Nutanix, VMware, SmartX

Gartner has released the 2024 “Market Guide for Full-Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software”, with an analysis of key vendors including Nutanix, Broadcom (VMware), and SmartX.

Notably, the report mentions that hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendors are expanding to the cloud and toward the edge, emerging as prominent players in the distributed hybrid infrastructure landscape. It recommends that users should implement full-stack HCI as a revirtualization path. Additionally, due to the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, the report predicts that the 30% of the non-VMware full-stack HCI installed base that exists in 2024 will increase to 60% by 2029.

Nutanix

For this vendor, Gartner highlights that Nutanix has been a leader in HCI for more than 10 years with a comprehensive set of full-stack infrastructure services. Nutanix HCI software is available as a subscription and can be deployed on many server platforms and in the AWS or Azure cloud.

About the Nutanix offerings, the Nutanix Cloud Platform is composed of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (AOS Storage, AHV hypervisor, virtual networking, disaster recovery and security), Nutanix Cloud Manager (automation, self-services, AI-enabled ops), Nutanix Unified Storage (block, file, object and data lens) and Nutanix Database Service. The Nutanix offering includes the AHV hypervisor, but also supports VMware’s ESXi, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, and a variety of Kubernetes solutions, including Red Hat OpenShift. Nutanix Cloud Cluster NC2 extends the core Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) stack to operate on bare metal instances in public clouds. This allows customers to easily migrate or extend applications from on-premises to public cloud providers to enable distributed hybrid infrastructure (DHI) unified IT operations.

Broadcom (VMware)

For this vendor, Gartner has specifically mentioned the change of business units, elimination of SKUs, and discontinuance of the sale of perpetual licenses and associated support renewals for existing VCF customers. VMware was acquired by Broadcom in November 2023. Following the acquisition, VMware is now four business units within Broadcom: VMware Cloud Foundation, Application Network Security, Tanzu and Software-Defined Edge. The overall product focus has shifted with the elimination of some 56 separate SKUs. These SKUs have been folded into new offerings to simplify what Broadcom sells and supports. It now focuses on its full-stack HCI product, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), as its flagship enterprise hybrid cloud solution.

Another significant change following the acquisition is the discontinuance of the sale of perpetual licenses and associated support renewals for existing VCF customers. VMware Cloud Foundation is now offered only through subscriptions. Customers may continue using perpetual licenses with active support contracts, but they will be transitioned to new subscriptions when their license terms expire. VMware Cloud Foundation is available across public cloud solutions using a consistent infrastructure stack running in many major hyperscale public clouds (e.g., Amazon Web Services [AWS], Azure, Google Cloud Platform [GCP], Oracle and IBM).

SmartX

For this vendor, Gartner highlights its support for both virtualized and containerized applications in production, suitable for use cases beyond optimizing virtualization, disaster recovery, remote-office, branch-office, edge and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementations to cloud-native and AI infrastructure. SmartX HCI is priced per node and sold via a perpetual license model and subscription model.

SmartX promotes its value proposition as simplifying IT infrastructure through modernization. Though the company offers distributed block storage and cloud-native storage solutions, it positions its SmartX HCI as an optimal path to achieving modernization. SmartX’s support for critical virtualized workloads in financial services provides supporting evidence that its HCI supports most business applications. With SMTX Kubernetes Service, SmartX HCI can provide unified management, network and storage for both virtualized and containerized workloads. Besides its own KVM-based hypervisor, SmartX HCI also supports VMware vSphere, along with Citrix XenServer for VDI use cases.

To read the full report, please visit: https://www.gartner.com/document/code/790324