SmartX ranks No.1 in China’s HCI software market for 13 consecutive quarters, with IDC recognition, enterprise-scale validation, and SmartX ECP 6.3 innovations across HCI, VMware replacement, DR, and AI-ready infrastructure.
CPU utilization is not always the cause of VM performance issues. Learn how CPU ready wait time percentage reveals hidden CPU contention, why it increases, and how SmartX ECP helps optimize virtualization performance.
SmartX has helped more than 40 new energy enterprises modernize IT infrastructure with SmartX ECP. Across power batteries, electric vehicles, energy storage, hydrogen energy, and advanced materials, manufacturers are using standardized HCI to accelerate factory deployment, support mission-critical production systems, and replace legacy VMware environments.
Replacing VMware requires an efficient and reliable cross-platform VM migration solution. This article takes a technical deep dive into the SMTX Migration Tool, exploring its workflow, snapshot-based full data copy, incremental synchronization during cutover, and post-migration validation process to ensure seamless migration with minimized downtime from VMware ESXi to SmartX ECP.
Kernel bypass NICs reduce traditional TCP/IP latency by avoiding kernel stack overhead, memory copies, interrupts, and context switches through user-space drivers, zero-copy DMA, polling, and hardware offload. With PCI passthrough and SR-IOV, SmartX ECP lets VMs directly use Solarflare NIC capabilities such as PTP and Onload. In testing, SR-IOV significantly lowered VM network latency, and Onload further reduced it to 2-3 us, enabling low-latency VM deployment for HFT and HPC while reducing hardware cost and power consumption.
Ports and terminals are undergoing rapid digital transformation, where operational continuity and infrastructure agility are both mission-critical. SmartX ECP provides a modern infrastructure foundation for smart terminals to ensure stable core system hosting, VMware replacement, ITAI transformation, and support next-generation intelligent terminal applications.
SmartX has officially released SMTX Kubernetes Service (SKS) 1.6, featuring form-based visual Kubernetes management, full-stack domestic IT innovation support, and optimized network isolation. With new support for Kylin OS, TencentOS, Huawei Ascend NPUs, and advanced network isolation, SKS 1.6 empowers enterprises in finance, healthcare, and government sectors to simplify cloud-native O&M while building secure, autonomous infrastructure.
SmartX ECP 6.3 simplifies large-scale VM operations with four automated features: one-click VMTools upgrades, unified SSH port modification, forced NTP synchronization, and multi-level VM grouping—boosting efficiency, security, and operational consistency.
SmartX ECP 6.3 delivers 11M+ IOPS and 130+ GiB/s bandwidth on a three-node HCI cluster through technical advancements across four key dimensions—system kernel, hardware acceleration, storage-network aggregation, and storage scalability. The test results from Hygon and Kunpeng environments also break the industry misconception that “ITAI platforms suffer significant performance degradation.”
Rising AI demand and soaring hardware prices are putting pressure on enterprise IT budgets. With broad hardware compatibility, flexible deployment models, and heterogeneous cluster support, SmartX ECP helps enterprises reuse existing servers to reduce infrastructure costs while replacing VMware and modernizing IT environments.
SmartX ECP 6.3 extends high availability (HA) capabilities to VMs using SR-IOV passthrough NICs, vGPUs, and Hygon HCT devices—addressing a long-standing limitation in hardware-accelerated virtualization scenarios. This blog explores the architecture, HA workflow, competitive advantages over VMware and Nutanix, and real-world deployments in low-latency trading and national cryptography transformation scenarios.
SmartX and Hygon have launched the industry’s first “Chip-Native Encryption + Virtualization HA” solution, integrating Hygon CPU HCT encryption with SmartX ECP high-availability capabilities. The solution enables encrypted VMs to recover automatically across nodes, enhancing security, performance, and continuity for mission-critical systems in finance and other industries.
SmartX has been named a representative vendor in Gartner’s Market Guide for Container Management Platforms in China, recognizing its growing momentum in AI-native cloud infrastructure. This article explores how SmartX Kubernetes Service (SKS) aligns with emerging trends in GPU orchestration, AI workloads, and unified cloud management—while helping enterprises modernize beyond VMware with integrated VM and container operations on a single platform.
SmartX ECP 6.3 introduces cross-NIC, multi-link RDMA bonding to deliver true high availability for latency-sensitive workloads. By combining OVS-based bonding with RDMA software multipathing, it elevates redundancy from port-level to NIC-level, enabling seamless failover without compromising microsecond-level latency. This upgrade addresses long-standing issues such as MAC flapping and unpredictable reconnections, providing financial-grade reliability for mission-critical applications while maintaining high performance.
SmartX and Information2 deliver a joint HCI disaster recovery solution that achieves near-zero RPO and RTO on SmartX ECP. By combining a lightweight, scalable hyperconverged foundation with advanced data protection and replication technologies, the solution simplifies DR deployment, enhances flexibility, and ensures continuous business availability across mission-critical workloads.
SmartX ECP 6.3 enhances disaster recovery with native synchronous replication (RPO=0) and CloudTower HA, delivering full-stack protection across data, business, and control planes—while simplifying architecture and ensuring reliable business continuity for critical workloads.
Lead the new standard for critical business support in HCI with SmartX ECP 6.3.
SmartX and AsiaInfo Security work collaboratively based on respective strengths in IT foundation and cybersecurity capabilities to build an integrated defense-in-depth system, effectively responding to various security threats and making your enterprise cloud compliant.
In Q1 2026, SmartX debuts ECP 6.3 & AI Platform for mission-critical workloads, while hitting 11 quarters atop China’s HCI software market.
SmartX released SMTX OS 6.3, advancing availability, disaster recovery, performance, and security to fully support critical workloads and reduce TCO.
Modern chips cause resource waste and latency. SmartX ECP uses fine-grained CPU & NUMA tuning to balance high performance with low costs.
Moving from AI PoC to production? Identify 5 key hurdles—from selection to delivery—and solve them with MaaS for double the efficiency.
SmartX debuts SMTX AI Platform Enterprise Edition: a powerhouse for unified model delivery and management, fueling production-ready AI in enterprises.
Deploying AI in private environments is often hindered by technical complexity. To accelerate your organization’s success, we explore ten vital concepts, from AI infrastructure and MLOps to MaaS and AI agents.
SmartX ECP provides a full-stack, stable HCI solution for the semiconductor manufacturing chain, supporting core production (MES/EAP), R&D, and VDI while offering a high-performance, cost-effective alternative to VMware.
SmartX ECP rivals all-flash storage for Oracle ADG, cutting latency from vSAN’s 900s to <90s. It proves a high-performance, cost-efficient HCI alternative for banking database use cases.
SmartX ECP delivers bare-metal-level latency for securities trading, using ELF virtualization and SR-IOV to achieve <2μs RTT with zero packet loss at scale.
As enterprises seek reliable VMware alternatives, SmartX distributed storage (ZBS & SFS) emerges as a high-performance contender. This comparison reveals how SmartX matches vSAN’s enterprise features while delivering superior stability during snapshots, high utilization, and hardware failures. Discover why SmartX is the optimized choice for mission-critical workloads.
IDC released the latest “IDC China HCI Market Overview, 2025 Q3”. In the HCI software rankings for the first three quarters of 2025, SmartX ranked first with a 33.1% market share. This marks the 11th consecutive quarter that SmartX has led the Chinese HCI software market (from Q1 2023 to Q3 2025).
In 2025, SmartX solidified its leadership in the HKMO market, dominating IDC and Gartner rankings for HCI and virtualization. By launching ECP 6.2 and SKS 1.5, SmartX accelerated the global “VMware exit” movement, delivering mission-critical reliability to finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. From robust IT modernization to cutting-edge AI infrastructure, SmartX is no longer just an alternative—it is the new standard for the AI era.
Conventional upgrades are resource-intensive and error-prone due to complex manual steps. SmartX addresses this by integrating the Upgrade Center into its CloudTower management platform, which uses advanced visualization, automation, and fine-grained control to fundamentally simplify the procedure and guarantee platform stability.
Amid rapid growth in NEV and rail transit sectors, manufacturers demand modernized IT infrastructure. SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP) replaces VMware virtualization/vSAN, delivering high-performance, reliable, and manageable solutions for core systems (MES, PLM) and cutting-edge applications (IoV, Big Data Platform), addressing rising licensing costs and performance bottlenecks.
SmartX has empowered numerous new energy enterprises to replace VMware virtualization and vSAN with SmartX ECP, providing high-performance, highly reliable, and easy-to-manage IT infrastructure support for mission-critical application systems (such as MES, PLM, ERP, and SCADA), and more scenarios.
IT operations teams often face inefficiencies and a high risk of configuration errors when managing large numbers of virtual machines (VMs) on virtualization platforms like VMware. SMTX VMTools addresses these challenges by enhancing visibility, control, and efficiency in VM management.
SKS 1.5 introduces cross-site active-active deployment, multi-tenancy, and enhanced observability, ensuring enterprise-grade reliability for critical container workloads.
SMTX Backup & Disaster Recovery not only provides core functionalities on par with VMware in virtual machine (VM) replication and fault recovery orchestration, but also integrates advanced features like native backups, seamless cross-site network failover, and sandbox testing. These features enable users to build a comprehensive and unified disaster recovery system.
SmartX has been recognized for the third consecutive year as a Representative Vendor in Gartner’s Market Guide for Server Virtualization Platforms, highlighting its production-grade virtualization platform and large-scale enterprise deployments that empower users to accelerate VMware replacement with proven stability and cost efficiency.
15 hospitals are replacing VMware virtualization with SmartX ECP to enhance stability, security, and efficiency. Key applications such as HIS, EMR, and PACS are now supported on SmartX’s high-performance platform, driving significant cost savings and IT modernization in the healthcare sector.
Three leading airline and railway groups have successfully replaced VMware virtualization and vSAN with SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP), advancing IT Application Innovation (ITAI) while achieving higher stability, flexibility, and cost efficiency across critical systems.
SmartX ranks No.1 in China’s HCI software market for the 10th consecutive quarter, strengthening its leadership in full-stack enterprise cloud and VMware alternatives.
In Q3 2025, we provided an in-depth analysis of SmartX ECP as an enterprise IT infrastructure solution and VMware alternative through two blog series – Busting the Myths and SmartX vs. VMware. We continued to work closely with enterprises, especially large manufacturers, to modernize IT infrastructure and connect with our partners through various events.
5 enterprise stories in leveraging SmartX ECP to support ROBO, VMware/Nutanix replacement, and Dev/Test with VDI.
Six manufacturers leverage SmartX ECP to build the full-stack enterprise cloud and provide core applications with high-performance and stable support.
As a robust alternative to VMware Tanzu, SKS offers comparable container management with simpler, unified management for hybrid environments and enhanced domestic ecosystem compatibility.
Moving on from VMware? SmartX Everoute is a great alternative to NSX. It provides all the key features—like distributed firewall and traffic visualization—but with simpler, unified management. This makes network security easier to handle and more affordable.
As the virtualization module of SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP), SmartX native hypervisor – ELF provides robust enterprise-grade virtualization capabilities with high availability and optimized performance, enabling IT teams to manage and operate virtual machines (VMs) with greater efficiency and confidence.
As a competitive full-stack alternative to VMware, SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP) offers four solutions that allow enterprises to replace VMware vSphere, vSAN, Tanzu, NSX, and other components at their own pace, achieving cost reduction and efficiency gains.
This article busts the myth that HCI platforms like SmartX ECP fall short for containerized workloads—highlighting how its built-in SKS delivers near-bare-metal performance, consistent multi-layer scheduling, unified networking, and streamlined management to support Kubernetes at scale with confidence.
In this article, we’ll address several misconceptions around SmartX ECP O&M and explain how we empower IT teams to master O&M with ease.
In this article, we’ll address three of the most common misconceptions about SmartX ECP when it comes to ensuring stability and system control.
In this article, we’ll address three of the most prevalent misconceptions about SmartX ECP in supporting mission-critical applications and databases.
Many see hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) as limited, questioning its ability to deliver a comprehensive cloud. Gartner-listed SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (SmartX ECP) is a full-stack enterprise cloud solution. It proves HCI can reduce complexity and costs while providing high performance, robust security, and seamless integration for all your cloud needs.
Xinyi Glass replaced VMware with SmartX ECP, building active-active data center clusters. This achieved 18% performance gains and 30% cost reduction for core databases, while enhancing security. The move significantly boosted IT availability and efficiency, marking a successful digital transformation.
In Q2 2025, IDC recognized SmartX for topping China’s HCI software market for the second consecutive year. We continued to innovate our products and solutions, with the release of SKS 1.4 and significant upgrades of the VCCI solution in security management. We also shared compelling customer stories across the financial services and healthcare sectors, showcasing how SmartX ECP enables core system operations, serves as a VMware alternative, and facilitates IT modernization.
This blog will continue to focus on SmartX ECP’s use cases in achieving disaster recovery (DR) across multiple campuses, supporting hospital-specific applications such as integration platforms and PACS, advancing cloud-native transformation and migrating from public cloud to on-premises platforms.
This blog will focus on SmartX ECP’s use cases in building enterprise cloud platforms capable of running core clinical systems and databases and replacing VMware and Nutanix in healthcare institutions.
This blog focuses on SmartX ECP’s use cases in the funds and trusts industries, sharing customer stories and more insights into FSI digital transformation.
This blog will focus on SmartX ECP’s use cases in the securities and futures industries, sharing customer stories and more insights into FSI digital transformation.
SmartX has helped over 400 FSI enterprises modernize their IT infrastructure using our Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP). This blog focuses on SmartX ECP’s use cases in the banking and insurance industries, sharing customer stories and more insights into FSI digital transformation.
SmartX VM-Container Converged Infrastructure (VCCI) solution now supports the unified network security policy management of both VMs and containers. This enhanced feature ensures the efficient interoperability between virtualized and containerized applications while boosting the data security, visualization, and O&M simplicity of the entire SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP).
According to IDC report “China Software-defined Storage and Hyperconverged System Market Overview 2024 Q4”, SmartX ranked No. 1 in China’s hyper-converged software market in 2024 full year with a 28.4% share, maintaining its leading position for the second consecutive year (2023–2024).
In Q1 2025, SmartX continued to be recognized by IDC and Gartner as the leader in China’s HCI Software Market. We released SmartX ECP v6.2 and enhanced various features in security, performance, availability, and O&M support. Facing enterprise demands regarding DeepSeek, we introduced a private deployment solution based on SmartX ECP to accelerate enterprises’ DeepSeek deployment and validation process.
With SmartX ECP, enterprises can deploy DeepSeek (with various parameters) on virtual machines (VMs) or on the bare-metal Kubernetes. By simply scaling ECP clusters with GPU-deployed nodes, enterprises can build flexible and high-performance DeepSeek infrastructure and accelerate the business validation process.
SmartX is thrilled to introduce Enterprise Cloud Platform v6.2, delivering enhanced security, compliance, performance, and availability for enterprise users.
With the release of SMTX OS 6.1, SmartX ECP improves its capabilities in handling hard disk failures by adding new features to identify I/O blocking and software RAID failures, further ensuring continuity and stability for critical businesses.
Visit us at Booth A13 to delve deeper into our AI infrastructure solution and discover how SmartX ECP can benefit insurance companies!
In this blog, we will dive deep into the configuration strategies for using EC, and provide the best practices for using data replication and EC in SmartX ECP through comparisons and real cases.
According to the recent IDC report, SmartX leads the China HCI software market with a share of 30.5% in 2024 Q1-Q3, which also marks the 7th consecutive quarter that SmartX has taken the lead (2023 Q1 – 2024 Q3).
As SmartX keeps innovating IT infrastructure solutions and offers SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP), this article will provide updated information on what makes SmartX ECP a competitive alternative for Nutanix solutions, including product and performance comparisons, four migration approaches, and four customer use cases.
Join us for an exclusive webinar where we explore the latest trends in digital workspaces, identify common VDI user experience challenges, and show you how SmartX VDI Solution can transform your VDI environment by improving performance, reducing costs, and simplifying management.
In Q4 2024, SmartX continued to be recognized by IDC as the leader in China’s HCI Software Market for the first half of 2024. We further expanded the HK & MO markets and have acquired several enterprise-grade use cases with the help of our partners including Homison Solutions and Zens.
With the release of SMTX OS 6.1, ZBS (distributed block storage component of SMTX OS and SmartX ECP) has enhanced its storage tiering model by segmenting the cache layer into a cluster-level write cache pool and a node-level read cache pool, allowing users to leverage Erasure Coding (EC) for data redundancy protection under extensive data storage scenarios while improving space utilization.
With SmartX ECP, the hospital has fulfilled the goals of IT infrastructure modernization and achieved integrated management of virtualized and containerized environments.
According to “IDC China Software-defined Storage and Hyperconverged System Market Overview, 2024 Q2” report, SmartX continues to lead the China HCI software market with a share of 25.5% in 2024H1.
In Q3 2024, SmartX continued receiving recognition from IDC and Gartner for our HCI-powered Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP) and native hypervisor ELF. We also hosted the HK Grand Opening Event and VMware HCI Alternative Webinar to strengthen our collaboration with HK & MO partners and cus…
SKS 1.3 greatly improves the user experience of container management on SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (SmartX ECP).
On September 13, 2024, SmartX successfully hosted the HK Grand Opening and Channel Kick-off Event, bringing together partners from Hong Kong and Macao. The event aimed to empower our partners to help more HK and MO enterprise customers modernize their IT infrastructures with restricted budgets but increased efficiency using SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP).
As the software-defined network and security component of SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP), Everoute 3.0 introduces Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networking, which provides secure and isolated network space for virtual machines (VMs) in SmartX enterprise cloud environments.
In the recently released “Market Guide for Server Virtualization” by Gartner, SmartX was again recognized as a representative vendor due to the rich enterprise features of its native hypervisor ELF, its capabilities of VMware replacement and migration, as well as its various customer cases in production environments.
In our recent HK & MO webinar, VMware HCI Alternative – More Than Replacement, SmartX experts shared their insights on Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, and introduced how to achieve a full-stack VMware replacement and IT infrastructure modernization through our new solution – SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (SECP).
To better support mixed workloads of VM and container, SmartX introduces the VM-Container Converged Infrastructure (VCCI), leveraging its full-stack hyperconvergence capabilities. It enables users to centrally manage foundational resources, enhancing interconnectivity between virtualized and containerized applications and resource utilization.
Recently, SmartX officially launched HCI 6.0, enhancing our Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP). One of the standout features is the introduction of SMTX File Storage (SFS), which enables SmartX ECP to offer enterprise customers stable, high-performance, and scalable distributed file storage services. With SFS, enterprises can meet diverse data storage needs using a single platform, reducing the costs associated with legacy NAS procurement while boosting storage reliability and performance.
Join our online webinar on August 8th to discover why you should transition from VMware to SmartX ECP!
IDC has published “IDC China Software-defined Storage and Hyperconverged System Market Overview, 2024 Q1”, analyzing the China HCI market and the China HCI SW+Certified Server System market for the first quarter of 2024.
In Q2 2024, SmartX was recognized by IDC as the leader in China's HCI software market for the full year of 2023. We have upgraded our hyperconverged software HCI 6.0 with five added features and four new scenarios to meet the emerging demands in the AI and container era. Additionally, we have provided our customers with valuable guides on VMware replacement and VM migration.
In the AI and container era, SmartX announces hyperconverged software HCI 6.0 with key upgrades, including 5 added features and 4 new scenarios, to help our customers address challenges in supporting different architecture and various new applications, managing and maintaining IT infrastructure, and replacing VMware products.
Featuring the converged deployment of compute and storage, SMTX OS (SmartX hyperconvergence infrastructure software) enhances the effectiveness of VM HA through storage features such as multi-replica strategy and rack awareness (topology-aware data allocation). Additionally, it offers rich VM rebuilding services that enable IT engineers to address various server and VM failure scenarios through an optimized VM HA function.
Many users are concerned about VM migration when planning to replace VMware. In this blog, we will dive into the entire process of migrating VMs from VMware to an alternative hypervisor, using SMTX Migration Tool as an example. Finally, we will share two case studies that have achieved large-scale VM migration from VMware to SmartX ELF virtualization using SMTX Migration Tool.
Leveraging SmartX’s native hypervisor – ELF, and user-friendly migration tool – SMTX Migration Tool, enterprise users can flexibly achieve production-grade VMware virtualization replacement and IT infrastructure upgrades.
In this blog, we will share four case studies of FSI, healthcare, and manufacturing enterprises that successfully replaced vSAN and VMware HCI with SmartX HCI solutions.
SmartX has introduced an HCI solution for AI applications. Featuring the convergence of compute resources (CPU and GPU), convergence of workloads, and convergence of storage resources, SmartX HCI provides enterprise-grade AI applications with high-performance, low-latency computing and storage that enables flexible allocation of resources.
SmartX takes nearly a quarter of the market, with a share of 23.5%.
This is the second year that SmartX is included in the report.
In Q1 2024, SmartX continued to receive recognition from IDC for our leading market share in China’s HCI Software market. Dedicated to IT infrastructure innovation, we released SKS 1.2 with outstanding performance and enhanced Kubernetes support for AI applications. We’ve also provided professional solutions targeting customers’ needs for ransomware protection and VMware replacement.
This article will comprehensively analyze different coping strategies for users of different VMware solutions, and provide specific suggestions for strategy implementation.
With these updates, SKS 1.2 helps users apply AI scenarios in containers based on easily created Kubernetes clusters.
This article presents empirical performance data of Kubernetes running stateful and stateless applications on VMs (SMTX Kubernetes Services, referred to as SKS) and bare-metal servers. Overall, the results demonstrate that SKS shows performance ranging from 82% to 96% of bare-metal-based Kubernetes, indicating that VM-based Kubernetes can effectively meet the requirements of the majority of containerized applications in production environments.
To help customers defend against ransomware attacks, SmartX has introduced HCI 5.1 portfolio with upgraded anti-ransomware capabilities. Leveraging SmartX observability platform (based on CloudTower), software-defined network and security product – Everoute, and SMTX Backup & DR, organizations can protect their systems from ransomware through a three-stage strategy: actively detect ransomware attacks, isolate infected VMs, and recover data in a secure environment.
With the introduction of SmartX HCI 5.1, our HCI portfolio has evolved into a full-stack solution that provides unified computing, storage, network, management, network & security support for virtualized and containerized applications in production environments. In this article, we will delve into key feature upgrades and new components of SmartX HCI 5.1, unveiling their potential to drive business value.