Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

Some people say that the war in the super-integrated market has been Game Over.

If you look at the report of IDC or Garnter on the super-integrated market, almost all the big companies and giants are included in the top list, and the difficulty of market competition is evident. Looking back in recent years, big manufacturers such as DELL EMC, Cisco and HPE have brandished their acquisition sticks and acquired several famous super-integrated startups in the market. Based on these circumstances, perhaps most people will agree that the super-integration market pattern has been decided.

But will it really be so? In fact, after the early "hundred Regiments War", the super-integrated market is ushering in a large number of users at the market level, while the surviving startups have experienced the baptism of the market. in products, technology, solutions, channels and other aspects began to mature, more focused they are accumulating huge market explosive power. Perhaps the war on super-integrated markets is far from over.

Super convergence is crossing the gap as a product form of data center infrastructure, it has received extensive attention in recent years. However, compared with other products, it has not been in the data center for a long time. With the help of the viewpoint of "bridging the gap", SmartX CEO Xu Wenhao believes that super-integration began in 2017 and is in the stage of bridging the gap. The so-called bridging the gap refers to the process of leaping from early adopters to most early adopters of a technology / product.

"in the field of super-integration, there are three key points to bridge the gulf. First, super-integration products can support key business and application scenarios in the industry; second, super-integration products must have complete ecology and solutions; and third, become leaders in specific segments of the industry." Xu Wenhao believes that since 2017, super-integration has officially entered the stage of bridging the gap. "before 2017, the super-integration market is a mixture of fish and dragons, and there are a lot of manufacturers in the market." but we don't see that super-integration can really be used in a production-ready environment. "

What does it mean to bridge the gap?

This means that superconverged products are playing an increasingly important role in the data center infrastructure, and will be accepted and adopted by more and more key customers in the industry, and will be put into more production-ready environments. At the same time, the super-integration market will still be in a state of rapid growth in the coming period of time. This is also confirmed by data from market research institutions. The latest Garnter report predicts that the global super-integration market will still grow by more than 40 per cent in 2019; IDC predicts that China's super-integration market will grow by more than 70 per cent in 2019.

Therefore, the super-integration market is piercing that layer of "window paper". For any super-integration manufacturer, this is the best time for the market. Because your products, technologies, and solutions can withstand the test of a production-ready environment, you can get users more easily than ever before and form economies of scale more easily, thus achieving breakthroughs in more market segments.

So, will there be any new changes in the pattern of the super-integrated market with a large number of companies?

Why product innovation companies cannot be underestimated it is undeniable that the form of super-integrated products relies on servers, so that traditional hardware companies or comprehensive product companies with market foundation, channel basis and user base are indeed easy to form a first-mover advantage in the early stage of the market. However, the author believes that in addition to large companies, in such a fast-growing market, if super-integrated manufacturers who focus on product and technological innovation can be prepared at the product, solution and ecological level, the market will certainly leave enough market space and position for those who are prepared.

Let's look at an example.

Take SmartX, for example, whose super-fusion products have conquered the most difficult financial markets in the past few years. At present, SmartX is already the top three super-integrated financial market segments and has the largest super-integration case in Asia with more than 3000 nodes. "the financial industry is recognized as the most difficult industry, with high barriers to entry," says Mr Xu. "however, customers in the financial industry invest heavily in IT and are highly receptive to new technologies, so if the products are excellent, they are more likely to be accepted by them."

According to SmartX, the reason why its products can lay a foundation in the financial industry is that its core products can fully support the production environment. First of all, its distributed block storage can support production applications; second, SmartX distributed block storage can support a wide range of virtualization platforms to meet the various needs of users; third, SmartX has a strong data protection capability and can provide data protection for production applications; finally, the operation and maintenance of SmartX is more simple, making it convenient for users to calmly deal with complex infrastructure management.

The advantage of conquering the most difficult industries is that it is easy for products to be replicated in the industry. After gradually laying the foundation in the financial industry, SmartX has made smooth progress in expanding areas such as health care, real estate, retail, and large enterprises, and has reaped a number of successful cases.

According to Xu Wenhao, SmartX has maintained a growth rate of more than 150%, and has begun to gain benchmark customers in overseas markets such as South Korea. The proportion of SmartX products used in the production business environment has reached 72%, and the repurchase rate of users has exceeded 70%. "A lot of customers just started buying 3-4 nodes, and then continued to expand to 40-50 nodes."

At the ecological level, SmartX works with the best partners in the industry to create the most competitive and complete solutions. For example, SmartX cooperates with Rancher and RedHat in the container field to greatly improve container management capabilities; at the security level, SmartX works with first-class security vendors such as Qianxin and AsiaInfo Technology, and so on. "from chip, network layer, to virtualization, container layer, and then to the upper CMP layer, SmartX has very good partners, and we will optimize the solution accordingly." It is reported that SmartX will complete the support for Huawei Taishan server this year to complete the support for Kunpeng chip ecology.

In addition, considering that the data center environment of finance and other industries usually coexists with a variety of hardware platforms, a super-converged software product with good support for different hardware platforms is undoubtedly the most urgent need for users. To this end, SmartX has spent a lot of energy on verifying the server's hardware to ensure that its software products can run stably on different hardware platforms. "SmartX carries out firmware-level verification for mainstream hardware platforms such as DELL EMC, Lenovo, Huawei, HPE, Tide, and Ultra Micro, and the support list is constantly updated."

As the super-integration is more and more used in the production environment, such manufacturers represented by SmartX are easy to get more market recognition, their potential power can not be underestimated, maybe they can really change the market pattern in the future.

China is giving birth to its own NutanixNutanix as a pioneer of super-convergence, which has played a huge role in promoting the development of data center infrastructure. In the foreign market, as DELL EMC, VMware, HPE, Cisco and other large companies have entered the super-integration market competition through mergers and acquisitions, Nutanix can still be an indispensable force in the market.

The reason is that the core competitiveness of super-integration is still in the software. Therefore, we can see a clue from the increasing proportion of products shipped in the form of Nutanix software. Nutanix can provide an all-in-one machine that is closely integrated with a variety of hardware platforms, as well as pure software products that support a wide range of hardware platforms, thus giving users full flexibility and choice. Moreover, with the trend that super-convergence has gradually become the mainstream infrastructure of enterprise cloud environment, Nutanix also puts more emphasis on the autonomous management and operation and maintenance of infrastructure.

The situation is similar in China, in addition to Huawei, Tide, Xinhua three, DELL EMC, dawning and other big companies, there are still a number of excellent and potential super-integration software companies. Among them, SmartX is one of the companies with the most potential to become China's Nutanix.

This is because SmartX's software products have lasted for six years and have experienced the test and baptism of financial and other industries and various business scenarios. There is no doubt that the latest version of SMTX OS 4.0 released by SmartX will further improve the super-converged software products in the aspects of virtualization, container, storage, operation and maintenance, support the "production readiness" of container storage, and support the SMTX Web console to manage vCenter virtual machines, as well as greatly improve the management capability of infrastructure.

Second, SmartX is beginning to take the lead in the layout of forward-looking technologies. For example, SmartX is optimizing and upgrading its products based on the value of new hardware such as persistent memory, RDMA and network-related technologies to prepare for the next generation of storage media and hardware. In addition, SmartX's integration and transformation of virtualization and container platform is also at the forefront of the market, combining distributed block storage, super-fusion technology and container management technology to create an industry-leading container super-convergence architecture that can easily apply containers to the production environment, completely solving the pain points of enterprise users in container applications.

Third, SmartX has a good market foundation, market ability and market coverage are more mature. Starting from SMTX OS 4.0, SmartX will be divided into two product lines: hyper-converged systems and storage. These two product lines are based on the same software stack, and SmartX covers more business scenarios through two major product lines.

Xu Wenhao said: "distributed storage is actually a component of previous super-converged products, which has steadily supported various types of business scenarios in super-converged products for more than three years. We hope that customers will use distributed storage products to replace traditional storage products when they gradually migrate to the cloud environment, because the use of traditional storage in the cloud environment is currently the biggest pain point for users."

Finally, SmartX is more adaptable to the local ecology and actively creates products, solutions and services that meet the needs of local users. At present, China's enterprise service ecology, composed of Chinese enterprise companies, is accelerating and will become an important part of the Chinese market in the future. To this end, SmartX has joined hands with a number of local CMP manufacturers, local security manufacturers to complete the docking, verification and integration of products, and can provide users with higher quality professional services. Xu Wenhao said: "the local ecological partner is an important force in the market, and the product docking, verification and integration with the local ecological partner need to do a lot of work. In this regard, the advantage of SmartX is undoubtedly ahead."

"be fascinated by users, be friends with time, be patient and focus." This is what Xu Wenhao believes. It is believed that with the gradual rise of a group of focused super-integration companies like SmartX, the competition in the future super-integration market has just begun.

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