Recently, leading HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI) and distributed block storage solution provider SmartX has been recognized by Gartner as one of the most distinctive companies to drive the digital infrastructure revolution in its latest report “Competitive Landscape: Hyperconverged Infrastructure, China”. The report highlights two competitive edges that differentiate SmartX from industry peers, which are “full control of its core technologies” and “production readiness”.
Gartner report outlines the development trends in the HCI market in China, with the following key findings:
- First of all, global HCI market keeps strong development momentum. Gartner predicts that by 2023, CAGR of HCI market globally will level up to 23%, with China region growing significantly as well.
- Secondly, HCI market is penetrating from middle-size clients to large enterprises, with the application scenarios going from virtualization of servers, VDI, branch offices to mission-critical workloads, such as Database and cloud, etc.
- Thirdly, the cloud adoption rate of large and middle size companies is still humble, with the cloud migration rate in 2018 as down as 11%. Hybrid cloud is still in its early days. Users prefer to deploy cloud infrastructure in their private environments.
The report lists key HCI players including SmartX, Nutanix, Dell EMC, Huawei, Sangfor Technologies, among others, and analyzes the difference among these companies. Dell EMC, Huawei and Sangfor Technologies are known for their years’ accumulation of data center customer base and channel coverage to gain market shares. Whereas, Nutanix and SmartX are competing in the market with their differentiated products and technology innovations.
According to Gartner report, SmartX was founded in 2013 as a dedicated HCI player, which has been known for its fully self-developed distributed block storage. Full control of the code helps improve the performance and reliability of HCI system. The core of its offering is SMTX OS, including KVM-based hypervisor (namely Elf, optional at no additional cost), distributed storage, and management modules that combine to serve as the foundation of an elastic hyperconverged infrastructure. In addition, SMTX OS also support vSphere and Xen. SMTX OS can run on certified servers from almost all mainstream x86 server vendors. Its footprint has extended to all typical HCI use cases in the financial, healthcare, and manufacturing sectors.
Gartner report says that SmartX has successfully penetrated into customers that heavily rely on IT for business and operation, including all kinds of financial service institutes, large hospitals, and manufacturing. Good experience in system reliability has earned customers’ confidence in their products and has given the company opportunity to scale – more than half of their financial industry’s revenue comes from existing customers. In these verticals, SmartX faces direct competition from global vendors such as Nutanix and VMware, where SmartX has advantages in terms of cost and time-to-response over these multinational suppliers.
As a pure-play HCI vendor, SmartX has built a relatively broad and open ecosystem, with multi-vendors support from server hardware, virtualization, upward to cloud management platforms – now it can work together with OpenStack and local CMP products to build a cloud infrastructure. The company also enhanced its data services and security to satisfy customers’ requirement on backup and security by partnering with specialized vendors. To support containerized workload, SMTX OS has supported Kubernetes CSI plug-ins and integrated hypervisor management with Rancher.
SmartX has announced that it will continue to focus on three pillars — product innovation, customer service and ecosystem partnership, based on its indigenous core technologies and the “production-readiness” design concept. We believe that SmartX will take up a bigger role in the competitive HCI market in the future.
Original Gartner Report
SmartX
Product or Portfolio Overview
Founded in 2013 as a dedicated HCI player, SmartX is known for its fully self-developed distributed block storage. Full control of the code helps improve the performance and reliability of the HCI system. The core of its offering is SMTX OS, including KVM-based hypervisor (namely ELF, optional at no additional cost), distributed storage and management modules that combine to serve as the foundation of an elastic hyperconverged infrastructure. In addition, SMTX OS also support vSphere and XenServer. SMTX OS can run on certified servers from almost all mainstream x86 server vendors. Its footprint has extended to all typical HCI use cases in the financial, healthcare and manufacturing sectors.
How This Provider Competes
SmartX has successfully penetrated into customers that heavily rely on IT for business and operation, including all kinds of financial service institutions, large hospitals and manufacturing. Good experience in system reliability has earned customers’ confidence in its products and has given the company opportunity to scale — more than half of its financial industry’s revenue comes from existing customers. In these verticals, SmartX faces direct competition from global vendors such as Nutanix and VMware, where they have advantages in terms of cost and time-to-response over these multinational suppliers.
As a pure-play HCI vendor, SmartX has built a relatively broad and open ecosystem, with multivendor support from server hardware, virtualization, to cloud management platforms.It can now work together with OpenStack and local CMP products to build a cloud infrastructure. The company also enhanced its data services and security to satisfy customers’ requirements on backup and security by partnering with specialized vendors. To support containerized workload, SMTX OS has supported Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI) plug-ins and integrated hypervisor management with Rancher.
