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

In 2017, Gartner reported in "Hype cycle for ICT in China 2017" that the super-fusion system was at the peak of the expected expansion period (Peak of Inflated Expectations), which indicated that the super-integration was at the peak of the conceptual speculation period at that time, and the market bubble was also the biggest, and the next 2-5 years would officially enter the actual landing stage.

Two years later, does China's super-integration market really go to the actual landing and become a mainstream choice for market users, as Gartner said?

Recently, Garnter released the "Competitive Landscape: Hyperconverged Infrastructure, China" report. The report again analyzes the current and future development trends of China's super-integration market. Gartner not only predicts that China's super-convergence market will continue to maintain rapid growth in the next few years, the range of super-converged applications will also be further expanded, and Chinese users' preference for private cloud also makes the super-convergence architecture more and more popular.

More importantly, we feel from the report that after many years of market baptism, China's super-integrated market has completely bid farewell to the chaotic situation of the "hundred Regiments War" and not only blossomed in many industries, but also let the market really enter an era of competition for differentiated values, and new strong ones are expected to be born in the future.

From the "bubble peak" to "actual landing", super-convergence pierced the "window paper" in the infrastructure field, who is ahead of the super-integration, who will lead the future.

Therefore, we can see that a few years ago, a large number of market competitors poured into the super-integration market, and the participation of a large number of manufacturers, large and small, could not be described as "the Battle of the hundred Regiments". There are not only Nutanix, the ancestor of super-integration, but also professional companies such as SmartX, which insists on writing every line of code, as well as giants in traditional infrastructure such as Huawei, Xinhua III and DELL EMC, and even cloud service providers such as QingCloud and EasyStack are also heavily involved in the super-convergence market. These situations make China's super-integration market inevitably go through a bubble period, as Gartner said in the "Hype Cycle For ICT in China, 2017" report: Super-integration was at the peak of the conceptual speculation period at that time.

However, as some people say: it is easy to do super fusion, but it is difficult to do it well. This means that the threshold for entry into the super-integration market is relatively low, but the threshold for doing well and doing well is higher, although many market competitors are easy to enter this market, but it often leads to weak market competition because of the lack of core competitiveness of products and technology.

In fact, from 2017 to 2019, super-integration has experienced a process from "easy" to "difficult" in the Chinese market. On the one hand, this "difficulty" is reflected in that the super-convergence manufacturers overcome all kinds of doubts in the market, extend the super-integration important users from medium scale to large enterprises, and let more and more market segment users begin to accept and adopt the super-integration system. On the other hand, super-convergence products overcome various technical difficulties and further expand the coverage of their application scenarios, from the initial server virtualization, VDI, branch and other scenarios to database, Cloud and other key business scenarios.

Take SmartX as an example, as a typical representative of China's super-integration market, apart from conquering the financial industry with extremely high barriers, it has gained a number of successful cases in medical, real estate, retail, manufacturing, large enterprises and other fields in the past two years, obviously feeling the substantial increase in the acceptance and adoption of super-integration in various industries.

Therefore, China's super-integration market is piercing that layer of "window paper" to achieve a real break-out and usher in a real explosion of the market.

From "hundred Regiments War" to "three types", Super Fusion ushered in an era of differentiated value. In this year's Super Fusion report, Garnter divides Chinese super integration manufacturers into three main categories:

The first category is the pure super-fusion manufacturers (Pure-Play HCI Vendors) represented by Nutanix and SmartX, which often win the market through the advantage of product differentiation.

Represented by SmartX, Gartner evaluates and analyzes as follows:

Product overview

Self-developed distributed block storage is well known in the industry.

Core product-SMTX OS hyperconvergence software not only embeds the free virtualization platform ELF, but also supports VMware and Citrix virtualization

Almost all mainstream x86 server hardware is verified and supported, and almost all super-converged application scenarios are covered among customers.

How to compete

It mainly covers industries that are heavily dependent on IT, including almost all financial market segments, health care and manufacturing. The good experience of reliability not only brings confidence to users, but also brings the expansion of business opportunities. Among them, 50% of the sales in the financial industry come from the expansion of existing customers.

Mainly compete with front-line manufacturers Nutanix and VMware, with more timely and rapid service response and higher performance-to-price ratio on the basis of users' trust in products

We have built a good ecology with professional manufacturers in related fields, not only can integrate private cloud solutions with OpenStack and local cloud management software vendors, but also have relevant professional cooperation and solutions in the aspects of security and data management. On the container side, not only does it support Kubernetes CSI, but its virtualization also has management integration with Rancher.

The second category is the traditional data center suppliers represented by Dell EMC, Huawei, Huasan, Shenxin, VMware and so on. This type of manufacturers achieve coverage through the existing market foundation.

Take Huawei as an example, Gartner evaluates and analyzes it as follows:

Product overview

HCI product FusionCube includes storage and KVM-based and Xen-based FusionSphere, as well as VMware;2. FusionCube can provide different node options according to different load and user scenarios.

Integration with AWS supports backup and integrates with Microsoft Azure and Zure stack

Only Huawei's own x86 servers are supported.

How to compete

Has a rich product stack from systems to infrastructure software to cloud management

Make use of existing market coverage and brands to obtain super-integrated market

In 2018, Huawei enhanced DBMS support and improved storage performance, helping FusionCube expand to financial and telecom operators

Established ecology, including Oracle, SAP, VMWare, Microsoft and Redhat, to help it expand more load

Huawei is a public cloud provider in China, which also enhances FusionCube's reputation as a hybrid cloud solution, although it is not the focus of the company's market focus.

The third category is the cloud service providers represented by QingCloud,EasyStack, which extend the market by providing customers with privatized deployment solutions.

Take EasyStack as an example, Gartner analyzes and evaluates it as follows:

Product overview

Focus on Openstack distribution and related services, and release its HCI products in 2018; 2. Integrated Kubernetes control plane and management of computing, storage and network based on micro-service model

Education and health care are the main markets of HCI.

How to compete

Benefit from the wide range of open source products in China.

Because of its own private cloud platform capabilities, Easystack uses HCI as a key step in customer-built private clouds

Infrastructure management containerization, further enhancing the flexibility and experience of upgrad

In 2019, it established an OEM relationship with a local server manufacturer in China.

This is the main situation of the domestic super-integration market at present. In the author's opinion, after the fierce market competition in the past two years, China's super-integration market has actually completed the preliminary elimination of the fittest, establishing the current market pattern dominated by three major types of manufacturers. different types of manufacturers have begun to form their own differentiation advantages.

Take SmartX as an example, technology and products are the greatest core competitiveness. SmartX's SMTX OS superfusion software has been tested in the financial market, making it one of the top three super-converged markets in the financial industry, and has the largest super-converged financial case in Asia with more than 3,000 + nodes deployed. At present, after establishing advantages in the technology and product layer, SmartX is also actively improving the layout of industries, channels, services and so on.

Huawei is a typical example of traditional data center suppliers. As a manufacturer who has worked in the data center field for many years, Huawei has the advantage of a perfect product line, a wide range of users and a mature channel system. Huawei can easily use its existing brand advantages to succeed in the super-integration market. Under the trend of super-integration of infrastructure, manufacturers like Huawei with strong technical strength and outstanding brand advantages need to consider how to balance the relationship and development strategy among many product lines of infrastructure in the future. In addition, we need to make the product more open and further help users improve the experience of building a true software-defined data center.

EasyStack is a representative of cloud service vendors marching into super-convergence. Such manufacturers have made good accumulation in open source and cloud native technology, but they generally enter the super-integration market relatively late, and the specific landing effect remains to be tested over time.

These three companies are typical representatives of their respective types, and they are also important competitors in China's super-integration market. Compared with North America and other foreign countries, Chinese super-integrated manufacturers have a greater impact on the market pattern, and even occupy a certain degree of market dominance.

In fact, super-integration is like a "focus" of the market. It turns out that different players in the market are approaching this "focus" from different positions based on their own differentiated values. For example, some manufacturers have deep virtualization products and user base and hope to consolidate their position in the data center market through super-converged products; others hope to take advantage of the technology and product advantages accumulated by cloud computing platforms. take advantage of the opportunity of the hybrid cloud market, with the help of super-converged products to extend the range of users; some manufacturers have rich and comprehensive product stacks, and the channels and ecology are more mature.

It can be said that with the super-integration market piercing that layer of "window paper", it is about to usher in an excellent market period: the acceptance of users is getting higher and higher, and the market potential space will be bigger and bigger. Super-integration manufacturers are easy to use their own differentiation advantages to establish economies of scale, achieve further breakthroughs in the market, and will try their best to make up for their own shortcomings, and then get more initiative in the market.

Looking at the future market trend from the trend of super-integration, Gartner predicts that the global super-integration market will still maintain a rapid growth rate of 23% by 2023, and the Chinese market will also maintain this growth rate; at the same time, the adoption rate of public cloud by large and medium-sized enterprises in China is not high, the cloud migration rate of large Chinese enterprises is only 11% in 2018, and hybrid cloud is still in its early stage. In contrast, Chinese users are more likely to deploy cloud-like infrastructure in a private environment. Therefore, China's super-integration market has just started and established a preliminary market pattern, and there is still a huge market space in the future market.

From the perspective of the future trend, it should be the direction that all super-integrated manufacturers will strive to do around the three angles of product, technology and ecology.

First of all, at the product level, super-convergence will certainly develop in the direction of "production ready", which will be the first choice for many industry users at the infrastructure level, and more core business applications will be deployed on it. Therefore, this requires super-integration manufacturers to further strengthen the ability of "production readiness". In particular, with the adoption of cloud native technology by more and more users, with the in-depth application of technologies such as containers, higher requirements are put forward for super-fusion products in terms of "production readiness".

In addition, the trend of software definition in the infrastructure field is becoming more and more obvious. take the storage field as an example, NetApp, a well-known traditional storage company, strongly recommended Data ONTAP Select pure soft products this year to feel the irresistible trend of software definition. In the field of super-convergence, super-convergence products will also be delivered to users in a pure soft way. This trend has been verified in the proportion of pure soft products delivered by Nutanix and SmartX, and this trend will become more and more obvious in the future.

Secondly, from the technical level, SCM (Storage Class Memory, persistent memory) represented by Intel Optane is rising rapidly as a new media in the data center. SCM has the characteristics of non-volatile, close to memory performance and flash-level content, which well balances the performance and cost gap between memory and flash memory, and is considered to play an important role in the future data center. Therefore, it will be an important trend to build and lay out the super-integrated product and technology stack around SCM. At present, including Nutanix, SmartX, MemVerge and other companies are actively layout this field.

The third is the open ecology, especially the trend that the Chinese market has established its own IT ecosystem in recent years, covering chips, operating systems, middleware, security, applications and so on. Therefore, if super-integration manufacturers want to make further achievements in the market, they must have a more open mind, in addition to the existing ecosystem, but also actively integrate into the new ecosystem. In products, solutions, service providers are closer to the needs of the local ecology, so as to play the maximum value in the market.

Overall, super-integration represents the long-term development direction of the future infrastructure, and the market pattern is far from being the winner. Who can really create unique value for users in terms of products, technology, ecology and services? who may stand out in the future market competition!

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