Recently, Gartner released its new report, Competitive Landscape: Chinese HCI Vendors. The report recognized SmartX for its full-stack hyper-converged product capabilities and its coverage of large and mid-sized customers in the finance, manufacturing, and healthcare industries. It highlighted and recommended SmartX as a representative of specialist HCI vendors.
This competitive landscape report is the third comprehensive analysis of the hyper-converged market trends and key vendors in China, following Gartner’s 2019 and 2022 reports. As a specialist in the hyper-converged field, SmartX has evolved over ten years, from its initial handcrafted distributed block storage to today’s full-stack hyperconverged enterprise cloud solutions. SmartX has continuously strengthened its product competitiveness, expanded its industry coverage, deepened ecosystem partnerships, and gradually built an all-encompassing advantage, from technology to market, which has garnered continued attention and recognition from Gartner:
- In the 2019 report, Gartner focused on SmartX’s R&D capabilities and its “production-readiness”.
- In the 2022 report, Gartner further emphasized SmartX’s success in building product competitiveness in reliability and performance, covering key business, general business, ROBO, and other scenarios.
- In the 2025 report, Gartner highlights SmartX’s full-stack hyper-converged product capabilities and points out that SmartX products can serve as a cloud platform supporting all mainstream business workloads.
In the latest report, Gartner introduced SmartX as follows:
SmartX is a dedicated HCI vendor, recognized for its fully self-developed block storage solution, ZBS. In recent years, SmartX has consistently invested in R&D to evolve into a full-stack HCI vendor.
The core of its HCI product, SMTX OS, supports VMware vSphere and its own KVM-based hypervisor, ELF. In the latest version released in 2024, SmartX HCI has integrated support for file storage, virtual private networks, distributed firewall, Kubernetes services, backup and disaster recovery. These functions are centrally managed through CloudTower, which also includes automated operation and maintenance (O&M) capabilities.
SmartX HCI is available as either software or an appliance, known as Halo. For the software version, SmartX offers both licensing and subscription models. The company targets midsize and large enterprises, particularly in the financial services, manufacturing and healthcare sectors.
Gartner’s main evaluation of SmartX’s competitiveness is as follows:
Building a competitive edge through reliability and performance, enabling support for mainstream business workloads on the cloud:
SmartX has successfully established product competitiveness in reliability and performance, enabling its HCI platform to function as a cloud platform that supports all mainstream business workloads.
Serving large and mid-sized clients across industries such as finance, manufacturing, and healthcare, with a high customer retention rate:
The company has a strong presence in midsize and large enterprises within the finance, healthcare and manufacturing sectors. The high repeat purchase rate among existing customers effectively demonstrates its technical strength and positive user experience. SmartX is now working to expand its success into additional verticals.
An open ecosystem with deployments spanning thousands of nodes for local processor support:
As a pure-play software vendor, SmartX has developed a broad and open ecosystem, offering multivendor support across systems, virtualization and cloud management platforms. In terms of local processor support, SmartX has been certified on Hygon, Kunpeng, Phytium and Zhaoxin, with thousands of nodes deployed in enterprises.
A robust technology ecosystem, offering solutions tailored to edge computing and AI opportunities:
In addition to direct coverage of large enterprises, SmartX has established a wide range of independent software vendor (ISV) partnerships, including those focused on data protection, databases, digital workspaces and industry-specific solutions, to build vertically and horizontally integrated solutions. The company collaborates closely with hardware vendors and solution providers to capitalize on emerging opportunities in edge computing and AI solutions.
The report also evaluates vendors such as Huawei and Sangfor and analyzes the current status and development trends of the hyper-converged market in China. Click the link for a detailed report analysis.
Explore more about SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform, the open and lightweight enterprise cloud powered by full-stack HCI.
