Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

As the best practice of software-defined data center, super-convergence is not only sought after by almost all the mainstream IT manufacturers in China and the world, but also recognized by more and more customers. However, the distributed storage with super-integrated core is not only difficult to develop, but also difficult for many product suppliers to accept and replace the original architecture in the production system. Why can SmartX, a Chinese super-integration manufacturer, be recognized by the leading customers in various financial segments in just a few years, and become the only Chinese manufacturer that can compete with foreign first-tier brands?

Recently, Ai Analysis, China's leading industry digital research and consulting organization, conducted a research interview with Xu Wenhao, founder and CEO of SmartX. The following content comes from Ai Analysis.

Super-convergence architecture is more and more favored by the market because of its advantages such as easy deployment and easy storage expansion. SmartX, a super-convergence manufacturer, built a production-ready modern data center with distributed block storage core technology developed independently, and won leading customers in the financial industry, such as Bank of Communications, Taikang Life Insurance, Guotai Junan and so on.

Under the guidance of national policy and the continuous education of the market, Shangyun has become the consensus of enterprises. In the process of going to the cloud, large and medium-sized enterprises prefer to deploy IT infrastructure in a private environment for security and other factors. When building a private cloud, computing servers and storage servers in traditional virtualization solutions are independent of each other, using centralized storage technology, because dedicated storage devices are difficult to expand on a large scale, unable to meet the growing data storage needs of enterprises.

Compared with separate computing storage virtualization, the super-converged architecture realizes the convergence of computing and storage resources through software definition on standard x86 servers, simplifying the IT infrastructure. More importantly, the core distributed block storage technology of the super-converged architecture can build scalable storage resource pools based on x86 servers. In view of the above advantages, more and more enterprises choose the super-integration architecture, which makes the super-integration market grow rapidly. Gartner predicts that the super-integration market will maintain rapid growth of 23% in the next three years.

Founded in 2013, SmartX is a technology service provider focusing on super-integrated products, with founding teams from domestic and foreign giants such as Nimbula (later acquired by Oracle), Microsoft, Baidu and so on.

With the self-developed distributed block storage core technology, SmartX has realized the large-scale commercial use of super-converged architecture, and won the leading customers in the financial industry, such as Bank of Communications, Taikang Life Insurance, Guotai Junan and so on. In 2019, the company was rated as a software-defined storage innovator by IDC, and in the same year, it also became a report on super-integrated market competition in China released by Gartner, which focused on enterprises. In the future, SmartX will gradually expand to cloud native and enterprise cloud based on distributed block storage and super-convergence technology.

1. Take self-developed distributed storage as the core to create a super-convergence solution.

SmartX mainly has two kinds of products: Super-convergence and distributed block storage.

In the software part of super-converged products, the core is the distributed block storage independently developed by SmartX, which solves the limitations of traditional storage proprietary hardware and centralized architecture through complete software definition and fully distributed architecture. In terms of virtualization, SmartX can provide free KVM-based virtualization services, as well as third-party virtualization services such as VMware and Citrix. In addition, the super-fusion scheme also includes backup, disaster recovery, operation and maintenance and other advanced functional modules. At the top of the super-integrated software is the Web console that uniformly manages each module.

SmartX super-converged products are software-defined converged computing and storage, supporting almost all mainstream x86 servers, helping enterprises build efficient and scalable data centers. At present, SmartX super-convergence products have been applied in key business scenarios, such as server virtualization, private cloud building, enterprise application cloud, containerization transformation, and so on. Among them, production-level business accounts for about 70%.

For customers who still adopt a separate deployment architecture, SmartX has also launched a separate distributed block storage product. Users can use standard storage protocols to access SmartX block storage products through OpenStack, vSphere, Kubernetes and even physical machines.

Both super-convergence and distributed block storage products support pure software delivery, and they can also directly provide integrated software and hardware machines to simplify the customer procurement process and enhance the after-sales service experience.

2. Locate the middle and high-end customers and improve the service system

As a pure super integration manufacturer, the brand awareness in the industry is relatively weak at the beginning, SmartX chose middle and high-end customers as its breakthrough to enter the market, and gradually establish its own brand.

Middle and high-end customers, such as finance, health care, high-end manufacturing and commercial chains, often have a high level of IT and pay more attention to the product itself when choosing suppliers. In the whole IT infrastructure, storage is the most core part, storage is not only related to business connectivity, but also related to the reliability of data. Therefore, when these customers consider replacing the original architecture with a new generation of IT infrastructure, they must pay attention to the stability of the product and whether the team behind the product can truly control the product, so as to provide support for the continuous evolution of the new IT infrastructure.

SmartX's independent research and development capabilities and innovation capabilities in the field of distributed storage and super-convergence just meet the needs of these customers, and SmartX's original vision is to gradually replace the traditional IT infrastructure with a new super-convergence architecture, rather than being limited to peripheral business use.

After several years of efforts, SmartX has won a large number of leading customers in finance, high-end manufacturing and other industries, most of which are top 500 companies in the world. Customers in the financial field include Bank of Communications, Guotai Junan Securities, Taikang, etc., Haier, Jingdong, Cedar Holdings in the manufacturing industry, country Garden and Evergrande in the real estate. SmartX is also opening up overseas customers, such as South Korea's SBS TV station.

After gaining the trust of head customers and establishing their own brand, SmartX has also launched entry-level products to serve small and medium-sized customers.

In order to facilitate customer service, SmartX has built a sound sales and service system. For key customers in the financial and medical fields, SmartX adopts a direct sales model, and pre-sales engineers and after-sales engineers are divided by industry, so that they can really communicate IT needs with users, and even explore some application scenarios with users. In addition to the financial and healthcare industries, SmartX has also established regional teams to cover retail chains and manufacturing customers in the region. In addition to its headquarters in Beijing, SmartX has established sales and service network branches in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chengdu and Seoul, South Korea. SmartX's regional sales team is also responsible for SmartX's channel system, and SmartX will provide certification for channel vendors' engineers to ensure their professionalism.

Perfect service network and professional sales team ensure the response speed of SmartX service and improve customer satisfaction. At the same time, cost-effective localization services also provide a boost for SmartX to compete with foreign manufacturers.

3. Win-win cooperation and open ecosystem

As a new IT infrastructure, to achieve the goal of replacing the traditional architecture, it is particularly important to establish an open ecosystem. Therefore, SmartX has established a professional ecosystem, from the bottom chip, server, middle network, virtualization layer, container, etc., as well as the above CMP, SmartX have professional partners.

At the bottom, SmartX works closely with hardware manufacturers. In 2019, SmartX and Intel established a joint laboratory to apply Intel's new generation of persistent memory products based on arrogance to the super-convergence architecture, and took the lead in the financial industry. SmartX and Huawei have also partnered to jointly authenticate servers. For other hardware manufacturers, such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Huasan and Tide's servers, SmartX's software products can also be fully adapted, and even different brands of hardware can be integrated into one resource pool. In the network layer, SmartX and Mellanox work together to build a high-speed super-fusion system. In the virtualization layer, SmartX supports mainstream virtualization technologies such as VMware, Citrix, XenServer and so on. In the container layer, SmartX cooperates with Red Hat, Rancher and other vendors to expand container application scenarios. In terms of security, SmartX and Qianxin have cooperation in program integration and verification. In the field of CMP, SmartX has worked closely with Feizhiyun and Luoyun, and there have been actual customer cases.

4, adjust measures to local conditions, differentiated competition strategy 1) the competition of super-fusion track is fierce, openness and professionalism are the greatest advantages of SmartX

There are three main types of manufacturers in the super-convergence market, the first is the traditional data center integrated IT software and hardware suppliers, such as Huawei, Shenxin, VMware and so on. The second category is private cloud service providers, such as Qingyun, EasyStack and so on. The third category is pure super-integration manufacturers, such as SmartX and Nutanix.

The advantage of the first category of manufacturers is that they have ready-made brands and channels that can provide complete solutions. In this regard, SmartX can combine professional manufacturers at each level to form solutions to compete with them. Distributed storage in super-convergence is the core of IT architecture. For customers who really care about the availability and reliability of products, the openness and professionalism of SmartX have advantages over these big companies.

SmartX has different strategies for VMware in the first category of manufacturers. VMware's own advantage lies in virtualization, but on the one hand, in the storage part of super-convergence, VMware's vSAN products are far less stable and easy to use than their virtualization products. On the other hand, VMware's virtualized services charge a lot. When competing with VMware, SmartX emphasizes storage stability, localization support, and a free virtualization platform.

The second category of manufacturers cut in from private cloud vendors, they use some open source technologies such as OpenStack, Ceph and other open source technologies to quickly package super-integrated products and diverge product lines, but the professionalism of their products is relatively weak. Therefore, such manufacturers will not pose a threat to SmartX in the super-integration market.

Among the third category of manufacturers, Nutanix products are done very well, but China is not the main market of Nutanix, so the support of Nutanix in China is weak. Some large customers, such as Taikang and Bank of Communications, initially experience the super-integration architecture through Nutanix, but when they are familiar with this architecture and use it in batches, they hope to find products with better service and higher performance-to-price ratio, which provides an opportunity for SmartX products to replace Nutanix products.

Last year, several large SmartX users chose to continue to expand, some of which have more than 60 nodes, indicating that customers are highly satisfied with SmartX products and services.

2) simplicity and agility and low total cost of ownership are the core advantages of superfusion in private cloud scenarios.

Private cloud is a bigger concept than super-convergence, because private cloud includes super-convergence architecture and non-super-convergence architecture. The construction of private cloud mainly includes the virtualization and pooling of the resource layer, and the cloud management of the upper layer, such as self-service, automatic approval and other processes. Super convergence is an implementation scheme of private cloud, which is characterized by the high integration of computing, storage and network resources. For example, Bank of Communications uses the super-convergence of SmartX to solve the resource integration of virtualization and storage, and then adds a cloud management software on it to integrate the original hardware to do the automatic delivery of resources, so that the overall solution is simpler than the traditional private cloud architecture.

SmartX CEO Xu Wenhao said that in the competition between SmartX and private cloud similar to Openstack solutions, distributed storage independently developed by SmartX has obvious advantages in storage. At the same time, because of the openness of SmartX super-convergence architecture, it supports different types of virtualization technologies better, and the professional cloud management software of partners is closer to users' needs than Openstack's cloud management features.

Therefore, when users build a private cloud, virtualize and pool resources, super-convergence is the easiest and most efficient way. Private cloud vendors such as Openstack can provide complete solutions, but in large-scale cases, it is difficult to do each module well.

3) it will be integrated into hybrid cloud ecology in the future.

The private cloud scale of most enterprises is not very large, basically less than 300 servers, and when different cities are divided into multiple clusters, super convergence is a lighter way. This approach is a very common scenario in the financial industry, manufacturing industry, including the leading enterprises in front of each segment of the industry. This is also the reason why the super-integration market has maintained rapid growth in recent years. With the rise of edge computing, super-convergence will also become the best way to build edge computing, and connect with public clouds and group private clouds.

SmartX's product roadmap already includes a multi-cloud architecture and will gradually promote cooperation with public cloud vendors.

5. Evolve to enterprise cloud based on super-integration

Since its inception, SmartX has been positioned as a new generation of IT infrastructure provider, and distributed storage as the core of super-convergence is an excellent entry point.

SmartX has always made products based on the idea of evolution. SmartX first did distributed storage, and then combined distributed storage and virtualization to make a super fusion. Later, in order to meet the scenarios of some large private cloud distributed storage pools, the storage in it was separated into a storage product line.

SmartX is optimistic about the market prospect of IT infrastructure in enterprise private deployment. After defining its track and advantages, SmartX will gradually shift from super-integration to cloud native and enterprise cloud this year.

On the one hand, SmartX will continue to innovate and improve existing products. SmartX will introduce the next generation of distributed block storage this year, a new hierarchical storage combined with Intel's latest arrogant hardware, which can reduce block storage latency by an order of magnitude than before and improve performance when used in critical database and data analysis scenarios.

On the other hand, taking advantage of the trend of localization and the rapid development of cloud native technology, SmartX plans to launch a next-generation computing engine based on cloud native technology this year.

Cloud native technology is specifically an ecology with Kubernetes as the core. SmartX embeds the Kubernetes engine into the new generation computing engine and further integrates virtualization technology, so that users can use a unified API to manage both virtualized application loads and cloud native application loads, making it easier to manage. At the same time, users no longer need to purchase products from virtualization companies and container companies respectively.

One product that VMware launched around November last year is called VMware Pacific, which bears some resemblance to SmartX's next-generation computing engine. So this year, SmartX will share the education market with VMware to help companies better transition to the cloud native phase.

For SmartX, on the one hand, it can seize the container market together with VMware. On the other hand, it is also an opportunity to replace VMware virtualization. Under the two-wheel drive of domestic dividend and cloud native technology trend, SmartX will actively promote the transfer of users to its new computing engine.

Along with cloud native technology, SmartX can more naturally implement the next step of enterprise cloud strategy. Because the cloud native has a very good ecology, it can be predicted that the future database technology, monitoring, application delivery, load balancing, including some network technologies, will be based on cloud native technology. SmartX also continues to introduce related ecology and related technologies along this line of thinking. In the future, with the popularity of K8S ecology, after the whole software ecology is built on K8S, the innovation speed of private cloud will be greatly accelerated.

SmartX founding team (from left to right: COO Wang Hongyi CEO Xu Wenhao CTO Zhang Kai)

Recently, Ai Analysis conducted an exclusive interview with Mr. Xu Wenhao, founder and CEO of SmartX, and had an in-depth exchange on SmartX's products and services, market status and other issues.

The epidemic will promote the increase of IT investment in medical industry

Love analysis: does this non-crown epidemic have an impact on SmartX, and what are the company's countermeasures?

Xu Wenhao: the epidemic is both a challenge and an opportunity for us. From the perspective of recent sales, due to the impact of the epidemic on user visits and installation, the sales project has been postponed to a certain extent, but in the near future, users will accelerate the digital transformation and the construction of IT infrastructure, which is actually good for us. From the perspective of product research and development, we are not affected. We have always adopted digital collaboration platforms, such as Github,Slack,Jira,G Suite,Zoom, etc., and we have long been used to the mode of remote collaboration. During telecommuting, colleagues actually work longer and more efficient hours than usual. From the perspective of response, the company announced early in the morning that it was in a state of combat readiness and established the following coping strategies:

1. Telecommuting: we always give priority to the health of our employees, unify the thinking of the whole company, and prepare for long-term telecommuting. As long as there is a risk of aggregation and infection, the company will telecommute. The company will also help employees to work at home as much as possible to improve office efficiency.

two。 Speed up product research and development: the epidemic has brought us a winding period of product research and development. Not only will we not reduce investment, but we will continue to increase investment.

3. To ensure the stable operation of the user system: being fascinated by users is one of our company's values, ensuring the stable operation of customer system 7 × 24, which is our commitment to customers and the foundation of our enterprise.

4. Thrift and optimize costs: this year, the company will reduce unnecessary expenses, optimize management structure, and improve cash flow utilization efficiency.

5. Efficient use of online tools for marketing: this epidemic has brought changes in the work habits of users and channels. Everyone is used to communicating and learning through online meetings, Webinar and online live streaming. Our channel activities and customer exchanges this year will be carried out in more online forms.

Love analysis: will the needs of medical customers change after the end of the epidemic?

Xu Wenhao: in the short term, for hospitals, at present, everyone's attention is on the battle of the epidemic, so there will be some impact on projects, but later this year, we think that hospitals will increase their investment in IT, especially in some online platforms, new business platforms, data acquisition platforms, collaboration platforms and efficient analysis platforms. Even before the epidemic, health care had a strong demand for new IT in recent years, and they had the need for smart transformation. The medical industry has high requirements for IT. For example, disaster recovery functions in the same city can only be found in health care and finance, but the operation and maintenance capability of IT in health care itself is far weaker than that of customers in the financial industry. Our new generation of IT infrastructure plays a very important role in simplifying the operation and maintenance of IT, so the demand for super-integration in health care has been growing.

Love analysis: will hospitals tend to put core systems such as HIS and LIS on super-fusion architecture?

Xu Wenhao: the core system such as HIS in the hospital is a bit like the core trading system in finance. The migration of the larger third-tier and first-class hospitals is relatively slow, but some small and medium-sized hospitals are different. They will put the core system directly on the super-integration.

Love analysis: on the government's side, is it possible for super-integration to cut in?

Xu Wenhao: the government is a relatively big business. In the past few years, we have mainly focused on the financial, high-end manufacturing and medical industries. This year, we will gradually start to lay out the government. In the next year or two, we will gradually expand the investment in the government market.

Diversified product forms to meet the differentiated needs of customers

Love analysis: is there any difference in expansion mode between all-in-one and pure software?

Xu Wenhao: the all-in-one machine is that we help users select specific hardware, adapt the software and hardware and deliver it to the customer. The servers are all standard x86 servers. Users can also buy their own servers according to our hardware compatibility list, where we deliver the software. There is no difference in architecture and extension mode between all-in-one and pure software products.

Love analysis: what factors will prompt customers to choose all-in-one machine or pure software?

Xu Wenhao: larger users, if they have more fixed hardware suppliers, hardware procurement costs are more controllable, may prefer to use software solutions. Some users may also consider integrating their existing servers, in which case they may also adopt a pure software solution. Other users, especially small and medium-sized users, prefer an all-in-one approach, which is easier to deliver and can be used directly on the shelf. The service is also relatively simple, just find a manufacturer directly to solve the problem.

Love analysis: Nutanix only sells all-in-one computers at first, and then pure software. Is it a common trend for software and hardware to decouple in the long run?

Xu Wenhao: the super-fusion system is the infrastructure for running the user production system, and the better cooperation of software and hardware can make the system more stable. In the field of super-integration, if you want to deliver pure software, you must make the hardware compatibility list very well. Users can not buy software on a server as casually as Zhongguancun machine, which has a lot of security and stability risks. Whether it is us, Nutanix or VMware, we will have a very complete hardware compatibility list. For example, if you want to buy a machine from Hewlett-Packard, we have verified the model, hard disk, CPU, memory, network card model and firmware version that you can choose. If you buy it according to our hardware compatibility list, there will be no problem. We want more and more models for software delivery, because our core competence is in software, which is the same as Nutanix and VMware. However, there are still some users who prefer all-in-one phones and hope to find only one manufacturer to solve after-sales problems, avoiding passing the buck between software and hardware manufacturers. From the manufacturer's point of view, we hope to gradually increase the proportion of software. But in the end, it is decided by the customer demand, in terms of customer demand, customers of different sizes, different industries and different sizes will have different needs.

There is plenty of room for growth in the super-integrated market.

Love analysis: how big is the super-integration market?

Xu Wenhao: hyper-converged products can enter the markets of storage, computing (virtualization and containers), network, system management and hybrid cloud, and will become the most important way to build infrastructure in private clouds in the future with the ecological evolution of cloud native and hybrid clouds. Its global market is on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Love analysis: what is the proportion of the super-converged market to the entire private cloud market?

Xu Wenhao: part of the whole private cloud market is super-integrated, and some are non-super-integrated. At this stage, superconvergence accounts for almost 10% of the private cloud. We expect that in five years' time, the whole superfusion should account for more than 20% of the private cloud, close to 30%. So on the super-fusion track, we think that the increment of the demand for its application scenarios is greater than that of non-super-integration.

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