The Forrester Wave™: Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Q4 2023

Hyperconverged Infrastructure Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

Key features and pros and cons of top Hyperconverged Infrastructure products:

Nutanix - Leaders

Pros:

Known for simplifying infrastructure complexity and applying that philosophy to hybrid cloud infrastructure
Dedicated customer base with Net Promoter Score of more than 90
Second largest HCI market presence by revenue and customers
Simple, flexible, and very competitive pricing
Excellent, modern GPU support
Flow Virtual Networking provides great network virtualization function support
Strong cloud replication and migration capabilities
Best-in-class scores for storage functionality and operations
Highly securable with advanced encryption options and certified FIPS 140-2 compliance
Workflows for containers, including OpenShift integration and Nutanix Kubernetes Engine
Supports both AHV hypervisor and VMware's ESXi hypervisor

Cons:

Room for growth with both hardware vendors and hyperscalers in partner ecosystem
Delivery on roadmap has been shaky in the past

VMware - Leaders

Pros:

Largest HCI provider on the market
Reimagined vSAN 8 offering for improved performance, cloud functionality, and scalability
Significant integrations between vSAN product and rest of VMware portfolio
Broad network of partners across cloud providers, systems integrators, infrastructure vendors, and sales channels
Enormous user community active on social media and at VMware-sponsored events
Strong GPU and DPU options through vSAN platform integration with vSphere
NSX networking enables advanced network virtualization function support and can be offloaded to DPU
Maintains both FIPS 140-2 and 140-3 certifications and excellent identity management capabilities
Top performer in scalability for hyperscaler integration, stretched clusters, disaggregated HCI, cloud migration/replication, and scripting and automation

Cons:

Maintains multiple pricing models with many options and tiers, which can be complex despite transitioning to universal licensing

Cisco - Strong Performers

Pros:

Third largest market presence in the HCI market
Benefits from good partner and channel relationships
Long-term customer relationships
Dedicated community of Cisco users
On par with most others in evaluation in terms of functionality

Cons:

Platform is being discontinued - announced in September 2023
Unclear long-term vision and limited available long-term roadmap
Limited hyperscaler integrations that affect cloud replication capabilities and container support
Declined to participate in full Forrester Wave evaluation process

Hewlett Packard Enterprise - Strong Performers

Pros:

Implementation support and customer success capabilities stand out with large global services group
Network of partners to help customers globally
Excellent support and relationship management
Differentiates with hardware-based encryption support via Silicon Root of Trust
Strong snapshots and replication capabilities
Good disk fault tolerance
Large cluster support
Federated cluster support for global-scale cluster management arranged in availability zones

Cons:

Small HCI market presence compared with Leaders
Balanced but not differentiated product strategy
Conservative feature roadmap
Lacks hyperscaler integration
Leaves network virtualization and advanced SmartNIC support up to VMware

Microsoft - Strong Performers

Pros:

Vision to blur lines between cloud and on-premises environments by pushing cloud functionality locally
Successfully leveraged long-time partners from systems integrators to infrastructure vendors
Strongest functionality area is operations, with platform management integrated with Azure console, Windows Admin Center, and Azure Arc
Multicluster management is relatively simple
Well supported management via API for at-scale automation
Excels in cloud replication and migration to Azure
Tuned for small edge clusters with ability to deploy single-node clusters or two-node HA clusters
Stays close to enterprise customer needs, adding requests to feature backlog and sharing product roadmap

Cons:

Most often connected to existing Azure deployment, limiting cloud flexibility
Individual cluster doesn't support more than 16 nodes
Cannot scale storage and compute separately
Noticeably weaker in hypervisor and DPU support
Reference customers expressed frustration about key features present in Azure but absent from Azure Stack HCI

Sangfor Technologies - Strong Performers

Pros:

Invested significant resources into innovation with multiple R&D centers in China
Year-over-year increases in R&D budgets
Focus on hiring personnel with advanced degrees
Depth of and support for modern identity management stand out with differentiated identity and access management support
Granular role-based access control and account auditing features
Strong scripting and automation functionality
Reference customers found support helpful and platform easy to use

Cons:

Global market presence similar to HPE, though most customer base is in China
Will require focus on partner ecosystem to elevate presence outside APAC region
Future roadmap is far shorter than other vendors
Specific weaknesses include hypervisor support, hyperscaler integration, disaggregated scaling, and automation support

Huawei - Contenders

Pros:

Strong APAC market presence with inroads in other regions
Very large cluster support for up to 256 nodes in commercial license
Overall product meets market needs
Customers happy with ease of use, platform reliability, and support

Cons:

Must improve partner ecosystem, especially in target geographies
Doesn't have self-sustaining community or plan for leveraging community
No specific features on future roadmap
Does not use etcd in container orchestration platform
Node failure tolerance doesn't scale linearly, with maximum of four failed nodes in cluster
Missing DPU/SmartNIC support
Constrained by sanctions that effectively bar it from US and several other countries

IBM - Contenders

Pros:

Flips HCI virtualization on its head, focusing on bare metal containers first
Global support means getting product delivered and implemented is easy
Kubernetes handles workload portability by default
Enables data portability by creating cross-platform common storage namespace with local caching

Cons:

Entry price of appliance is high due to minimum cluster size of six nodes
Doesn't yet have noticeable community
Compared with VM-centric HCI products, doesn't currently stand out
Lacks ability to scale past 20 nodes
Limited storage media choices
No support for storage- or compute-only nodes
Scant training for product operators available
Declined to participate in full Forrester Wave evaluation process

IEIT SYSTEMS - Contenders

Pros:

Leverages both conventional x86 and ARM virtualization (in China)
ARM hypervisor support allows for lower overall power consumption
Differentiated support for storage services like SMB, NFS, S3, and Swift APIs; K8s CSI drivers; and iSCSI volume export
Good stretch cluster support and large cluster support
SmartNIC/DPU support
Reference customers expressed satisfaction with usability and platform features

Cons:

Small market presence
Will need to strengthen partner ecosystem and bring clarity and flexibility to pricing model
Roadmap isn't detailed
Lacks certified workload validation programs
Single hypervisor support
Below-par identity management functionality (missing SAML and OIDC support)
Reference customers noted drawbacks related to clusters with more than 4,000 nodes

Scale Computing - Contenders

Pros:

Dedicated customer base with consistent NPS scores of 90 or higher
Stands out with small cluster/edge deployment flexibility
Massive number of nodes that Fleet Manager product can support
No two nodes need to be alike in cluster, meaning future deployments don't require rip and replace
Partners with Google for cloud-based replication and disaster recovery
Reference customers highlight simplicity, making it easy to deploy and manage

Cons:

Does not share published feature roadmap
Does not have stretch cluster support
Lags in options for high-end GPUs and processors
No support for SmartNIC/DPUs

SmartX - Contenders

Pros:

Successfully attracted customers with simple, competitive pricing models and good customer satisfaction
Excellent diversity of CPU support with ability to virtualize on Intel, AMD x86-64, and ARM
Native KVM-derived hypervisor as well as support for VMware and Citrix hypervisors
Supports very large clusters
Reference customers found SmartX meets their specific needs and provided much better support in Chinese market

Cons:

Vision is pragmatic but unrefined and not measurable
Innovation strategy lacks plan for turning R&D investments into new features
No stated support for deduplication or compression
Lack of cloud integration and replication
No native encryption capabilities
Performance issues with large cluster sizes can be problematic

FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2023?

A: Nutanix, VMware

Q: What does "Leader" mean in Forrester Wave terms?

A: Leaders in the Forrester Wave for Hyperconverged Infrastructure have strong current offerings with high scores in compute and network, storage and data, scalability and cloud, security, operations, and support capabilities. They demonstrate robust strategies with clear vision for hybrid and multicloud platforms, strong innovation roadmaps, comprehensive partner ecosystems, competitive and flexible pricing models, and active user communities. Leaders also typically have significant market presence with substantial revenue and large customer bases in the HCI market.

Q: How do I interpret a Forrester Wave?

A: https://www.forrester.com/policies/forrester-wave-methodology/

Report:

Top Vendor Products for Hyperconverged Infrastructure in 2023

Hyperconverged Infrastructure Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

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FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2023?

Q: What does "Leader" mean in Forrester Wave terms?

Q: How do I interpret a Forrester Wave?

Reference