Gartner has published the report Competitive Landscape: Chinese HCI Large, Specialist, and Crossover Vendors, in which SmartX is identified as a competitive provider in the Chinese HCI market in 2022 due to superior product reliability and performance. This marks the company’s second appearance in this report, following its appearance in Gartner’s first report on the Chinese HCI landscape in 2019.
The 2022 report sheds light on the trends and key players in China’s HCI market. Particularly, the report categorizes Chinese vendors into three groups: 1) large DCI vendors (represented by Huawei, H3C, Inspur, and Lenovo); 2) crossover vendors (represented by Sangfor); and 3) specialist HCI vendors (represented by SmartX). According to Gartner, specialist HCI vendors have distinct advantages such as strong vertical competitiveness, hardware neutrality, and cloud neutrality.
Aside from the consistent acknowledgement of SmartX’s “production readiness” and self-development of distributed block storage ZBS, in the 2022 report, Gartner also highlights SmartX’s outstanding products and services in terms of enhanced networking and security, leverage of advanced hardware technologies such as RDMA and persistent memory, and the availability of delivery in software.
In the report, Gartner suggests SmartX competitive advantages as follows:
- Established product competitiveness in reliability and performance.
- Support workloads ranging from ROBO to general-purpose to business-critical.
- A strong footprint in midsize and large enterprises in finance, healthcare and manufacturing.
- A broad and open ecosystem, with multivendor support in systems, virtualization and cloud management platforms.
- A nationwide distribution channel network.
- Large overseas markets with customers in Asia/Pacific and EMEA.
Below is the selected part (SmartX profile) of original report:
Product or Portfolio Overview
SmartX is a pure-play HCI vendor and known for its fully self-developed block storage, ZBS. SmartX focuses on data protection and data service capabilities to provide software-based enterprise-grade storage. The company currently has three main product lines, hyperconverged infrastructure (SMTX OS), distributed block storage (ZBS) and container-native storage (IOMesh).
The core of its HCI offering, SMTX OS, supports vSphere, XenServer, and its own KVM-based hypervisor (ELF). SmartX has enhanced its HCI solution in networking and security through microsegmentation. The support for remote direct memory access (RDMA) over converged Ethernet (RoCE) and persistent memory demonstrates the SMTX OS’ capability to leverage advanced hardware technologies.
SMTX OS can be delivered as software or as an appliance (named Halo). For software, SmartX provides licensing and subscription models. The company focuses on midsize and large enterprises from financial services, manufacturing and healthcare.
How This Provider Competes
SmartX has successfully established product competitiveness in reliability and performance, enabling its HCI platform to support workloads ranging from ROBO to general-purpose to business-critical.
The company has a strong footprint in midsize and large enterprises in finance, healthcare and manufacturing. The high repeat purchase rate of existing customers effectively proves its technical strength and good user experience. The company is trying to expand its success into more verticals.
As a pure-play software vendor, SmartX has built a broad and open ecosystem, with multivendor support in systems, virtualization and cloud management platforms. In terms of local processor support, SmartX has been certified on Hygon, Kunpeng and Phytium, with real use cases in production environments.
In addition to direct coverage of large enterprises, SmartX has established a nationwide distribution channel network. It works closely with hardware vendors and solution providers to seize emerging opportunities at the edge and in hybrid cloud.
SmartX is also actively expanding into overseas markets and has won customers in Asia/Pacific and EMEA.
For more information on SmartX HCI, download the product brief of SmartX hyperconverged infrastructure here.
Source:
Gartner, Competitive Landscape: Chinese HCI Large, Specialist and Crossover Vendors, by Uko Tian, Kevin Ji, Evan Zeng, October 31, 2022.
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