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The Future of the Converged Data Center

© 2016 SDNCentral LLC. All Rights Reserved. Page ii

Market Report | The Future of the Converged Data Center

contents

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Converged Data Center and Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter 1: Benefits of Data Center Convergence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter 2: Converged Infrastructure Use Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4

Chapter 3: Converged Infrastructure Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Chapter 4: Market Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9

Featured Converged Infrastructure

Juniper Networks, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Featured White Box and Supporting Applications

Big Switch Networks, Inc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Pluribus Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Converged Infrastructure

Cisco Systems, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Dell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Ericsson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Fujitsu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

IBM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

Lenovo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

NetApp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Nimboxx, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Oracle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Pure Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

SolidFire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Tegile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

VCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Converged Compute & Storage

Atlantis Computing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Data Gravity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Gridstore, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Nexenta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Nimble Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Nutanix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Pivot3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Scale Computing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Silicon Graphics International Corp. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

© 2016 SDNCentral LLC. All Rights Reserved. Page iii

Market Report | The Future of the Converged Data Center

SimpliVity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Skyport Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Super Micro Computer Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Teradata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

VMware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

White Boxes & Supporting Applications

Arkin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Cumulus Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Pica8, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

contents

juniper.net | opencontrail.org

http://juniper.net/instantevolution

Unprecedented Agility Deep Information Insight Enhanced Security

The only Software-DefinedNetwork designed for your Converged infrastructure

http://www.pluribusnetworks.com

© 2016 SDNCentral LLC. All Rights Reserved. Page 1

market summaryMarket Report | The Future of the Converged Data Center

Introduction: The Converged Data Center and Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI)The disaggregation of software and hardware is driving the emergence of new data center architectures built on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) or near-COTS hardware that converges the functions of traditional data centers into a single, converged infrastructure. This converged infrastructure pools compute, network and storage resources to simplify management and make it easier to scale up/down, move and share resources to better support fluctuating demands, optimize utilization and reduce overall costs.

In theory, a converged – or hyper converged – data center sounds great, but what does it really look like in practice? This report is designed to pull back the covers of the converged data center and describe its state today, with some assumptions and predictions of where it might go in the future. The report will cover:

•What is driving the need for converged and hyper converged data centers

•Emerging use cases and deployment scenarios

•Major organizations and influencers critical to the development of next-generation data center infrastructure

•SDxCentral’s taxonomy of converged and hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) solution providers and their role in the ecosystem, categorized accordingly

• List of key leading converged infrastructure vendors per category, their products, and best fit use cases

•How software-defined networking and storage tools are being integrated with server hardware to build converged systems

The report also includes the results from the 2016 Converged Data Center Survey. The SDxCentral Research Team surveyed the SDxCentral community to better understand if and how converged data center solutions are being deployed today. SDxCentral Survey ran on the SDxCentral site, January 28 – February 8, 2016. 91 people responded: 22% self-identified themselves as service providers, 36% as large enterprises, 42% as small-medium businesses.

For the purposes of the survey, a converged data center solution was defined as a hardware platform that integrates compute, network, and storage functionality, at capacity and performance-levels required to support the scale of a data center.

We hope you find the Report informative, providing a snapshot of what is happening today in the market and what’s to come. If you have questions, comments or feedback, we would love to hear it. Please reach out to [email protected].

Chapter 1: Benefits of Data Center ConvergenceThe three components of IT infrastructure have traditionally been compute, storage, and networking. The move toward, open, software-defined everything (SDx) infrastructure has enabled all these functions to be placed on COTS hardware, creating strong drivers for convergence.

The emergence of the SDx market means that more functions can be controlled by software regardless of the type of hardware function. Powerful COTS platforms for compute, storage, and networking enables these functions to be controlled, integrated, and managed from a central software management layer.

COTS Diminishes Need for Proprietary Systems

The trend toward COTS diminishes the need for proprietary systems. A reliance on closed, proprietary hardware stifles innovation and adds unnecessary costs and complexity to the infrastructure. As a result, we have seen storage, compute and networking functions all start to be abstracted – the value of these solutions is moving into software that can run on any commodity x86 server components. In some converged solutions, vendors take COTS systems and add their own differentiators, such as hardware acceleration for specific functions in storage

mailto:research%40sdxcentral.com?subject=



(de-dup, compression) or networking. Regardless, the primarily value-add is always sophisticated software.

The adoption of platforms/architectures, such as hypervisors, software-defined networks (SDN), and network functions virtualization (NFV) can result in more open, flexible, cost-effective and scalable environments. It no longer makes sense to have a wide range of proprietary, specialized systems, when you can build virtualized platforms that can connect with a software-defined infrastructure. It also no longer makes sense to keep all these functions separate – enter convergence, a.k.a. hyper convergence.

Trends in Convergence

Our research has revealed consistent trends in convergence in the data center, revealing common drivers. By consolidating all this software on a single, open, commodity server platform, organizations can:

•Simplify the Infrastructure – reducing not only the number of hardware appliances, but also the number of software platforms needed.

•Scale out the Infrastructure – adding components in a modular fashion, which can be plugged into the system, orchestrated and configured using software-defined management.

• Improve the performance of key applications – coordinating all the resources necessary to maximize the availability and performance of ‘Tier 1’ applications throughout the environment.

•Maximize the Return on Investment (ROI) of the Infrastructure – ensuring optimal resource utilization and minimizing capital outlays.

Overall Cost and Management Benefits

The increased use of industry-standard COTS hardware coupled with robust software management platforms to build the SDx infrastructure has many perceived benefits to users. Based on primary research, including interviews with industry experts and our own users survey, the primary benefits of a converged data center architecture include the following:

• Lower costs – requiring less hardware to purchase (CAPEX), since storage, network, and compute resources are combined in a single appliance, and reduced operational costs (OPEX), due to less real estate, power and cooling consumption.

• Increased flexibility – enabling pools of resources to be quickly deployed or moved to where they are needed.

•Simplified management – providing a centralized view (single pane of glass) into the infrastructure, which makes it easier to roll out, orchestrate and automate functions to meet changing requirements.

In the minds of the IT professionals considering and working with converged data center solutions, however, the benefits are not so cut and dry. The responses of participants in the SDxCentral survey were varied. sdxcentral.com

pRIMaRy beNeFITS

Scalability 13%

Centralization 11%

automation 9%

Capital Cost Savings

20%

Flexibility 18%

Operational Cost Savings

17%

Scalability 13%

Centralization 11%

automation 9%

Capital Cost Savings

20%

Flexibility 18%

Operational Cost Savings

17%

Other 2%

No benefits 3%

Visibility 3%

Orchestration 4%



When asked what they felt was the primary benefit, nothing stood out, which means either the value of converged solutions is still not clear or IT professionals see a lot of different ways they can benefit from these solutions.

‘Capital Cost Savings’ received one-fifth of the vote (20%), ‘Flexibility’ was identified by 18% as the primary benefit, followed by ‘Operational Cost Savings’ at 17%.

Convergence: ‘Important’ and ‘Mission Critical’

Feedback from users indicates there is high demand for converged data center solutions to solve basic problems. Users also cite a mixture of the top drivers for converged systems, include optimizing resource allocation and accelerating the roll out of new functionality.

Seventy percent of respondents to the SDxCentral Survey on Converged Data Center Infrastructure ranked the importance of finding a converged data center solution in the next 2–5 years as ‘Important’ or ‘Mission critical (Need a Solution ASAP).’

The drivers for this move are a little more mixed: 49% of respondents chose ‘Optimizing Resource Utilization’ as the biggest business driver for implementing a converged data center infrastructure; while 48% picked ‘Accelerating the Roll Out of New Functionality;’ ‘Reducing Costs’ and ‘Improving Operational Efficiencies’ each got 42% of the vote; while ‘Scaling Deployments’ received 38%.

sdxcentral.com

buSINeSS DRIVeRS FOR IMpleMeNTINg CONVeRgeD DC SOluTIONS

Scaling Deployments38%

Improving Operational efficiencies42%

Reducing Costs42%

preventing IT Sprawl13%

Don’t See advantages4%

1% Other

0 20% 40% 60% 80%

Optimizing Resource utilization49%

accelerating the Roll Out of New Functionality 48%



When asked what the most important attributes organizations were looking for in their converged data center solutions (they could pick two), the majority of respondents (55%) replied ‘Automation & Orchestration.’ A solution that could ‘Lower Capital Costs’ was chosen by 35% of survey participants, while ‘Interoperability with Other Virtualized Systems’ was cited by 30% as a critical attribute.

Chapter 2: Converged Infrastructure Use CasesThe need to better manage hybrid cloud environments, upgrade the existing infrastructure, or optimize the delivery of business critical applications has created many converged infrastructure use cases. Customers looking to consolidate data center resources, cut costs, and improve data protection are turning to convergence and hyper convergence as a critical tool.

Some of the most common use cases for a converged infrastructure include:

sdxcentral.com

CRITICal aTTRIbuTeS OF a CONVeRgeD INFRaSTRuCTuRe

0 20% 40% 60% 80%

Data protection and Security Features14%

Robust Networking Features14%

Interoperability w/ Other Virtualized Systems30%

ease of use22%

Computing power10%

energy efficiency10%

Robust Storage Features 4%

automation & Orchestration55%

low Capital Costs35%

2% auditability & Reporting



Foundation for Cloud Data Centers and Hybrid Cloud

A foundational infrastructure that can be used to implement private, public, and hybrid clouds is very important. Both enterprises and services providers are revamping existing data centers through the use of cloud architectures and all new data center build-outs conform to cloud architecture models.

HCI provides a natural hardware foundation on which to build out clouds. The concept of stacking yet another “Lego brick” when more capacity is needed without worrying excessively about the nature of coupling and interactions between compute, storage and networking frees data center operators from focusing more of their energies on other more pressing problems like automation and disaster planning.

And with the current move towards hybrid clouds for maximal flexibility and scalability, using converged infrastructure in private clouds provides a path towards effective hybrid cloud roll-out. The key is ensuring the converged infrastructure vendor can integrate with the service provider partners the organization wants to implement.

With a solution that can work with a broad set of service provider partners, organizations can build a cloud strategy to fit any and all of their requirements, in a way that is simple to deploy, manage and maintain. In addition, organizations look for automation capabilities, such as Cisco’s UCS Director and VMware’s vRealize Automation, that can support the self-provisioning and orchestration of workloads across cloud environments.

Data Center Consolidation

Data center consolidation has become a prime attraction to converged infrastructure. IT managers are looking to reign in appliance sprawl and ensure optimal resource utilization with a single, consolidated infrastructure that can be easily managed and scaled.

Data center consolidation also means resources can be deployed to enable organizations to accelerate time to business value, by unifying resource silos into adaptive pools of assets that can be shared by many and managed as an overall service.

There are a lot of claims around the benefits of a converged data center solution:

•Cisco claims UCS customers benefit from a 86% reduction in provisioning times, 77% reduction in cabling, 74% reduction in ongoing management costs, and 53% reduction in power and cooling costs.

•HPE claims its ConvergedSystem 700 requires 50% fewer management tools, takes 96% less server configuration time, and results in a 217% reduction in staffing costs versus the competition.

•SimpliVity’s Omnicube claims to deliver data center consolidation at a 3x total cost of ownership savings.

•Nutanix claims a webscale Converged Infrastructure that is 100% software-defined and can deliver up to 8x faster time to value.

Integrated Data Protection

In many cases, it makes sense to integrate storage hardware and software with the compute and networking functions in the data center. The most obvious benefit is centralized management of the backup policies for systems.

By consistently enforcing policies around the frequency of backups, retention time and storage location (including local and off-site copies), managers can ensure data on multiple virtual machines remains available in the event of a disaster.

Some of the hyper converged players, such as SimpliVity, say that bandwidth and storage needs can be reduced by sharing data in a de-duplicated compressed and optimized state and by managing the entire lifecycle of the data.

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/unified-computing/cisco_ucs_market_share_infographic_final.pdf



Optimizing Workloads and Applications

Converged systems can provide centralized visibility and management of workloads to ensure ‘Tier 1’ applications can be prioritized for optimum availability. Resources may need to be moved or allocated to meet spikes in demand for different applications.

In a software-defined infrastructure environment, the data, metadata, and operations of a system are often distributed across the pool of resources. A big advantage of this distribution is that data and workloads can be moved around to remove any bottlenecks or choke points. Overall performance and capacity can be easily scaled out, by adding additional units, as needed.

Some vendors offer dedicated ‘units’ of resources to support those applications that have a lot of storage performance demands, such as a virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI). These units set aside CPU and disc capacity that can be called upon to support the application. For those applications that may need to scale at an accelerated pace, ‘units’ may be too restrictive, requiring a hyper-converged infrastructure that can support clusters of servers.

When asked if there were any workloads or use cases that were not a fit for a converged data center infrastructure, 98% of respondents to SDxCentral’s Converged Data Center Infrastructure survey said ‘No.’ VDI is often cited as a workload that can greatly benefit from a converged infrastructure.

The drive to run Microsoft business applications more effectively is also a key driver for convergence. One survey by converged systems startup SimpliVity indicated that the top applications production workloads of their users include Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, VDI, and industry-specific applications (E.g. legal, healthcare, CAD, CAM) system.

Chapter 3: Converged Infrastructure Architectures As it turns out, there isn’t a single converged solution architecture, but many different approaches to convergence and hyper convergence. Convergence across the the SDx infrastructure is happening across many different vectors, with individual applications optimized for a unique mix of networking, storage, and compute functionality.

For example, a hyperscale Web platform might be focused on serving messaging, video, and content. A service provider hosting business applications may have different needs. ‘Webscale’ platforms have more traffic internal to their data center, giving them unique intra-datacenter networking requirements (more on that in sections about Facebook and Google below).

Let’s look at some of the detailed architectures proposed by the converged infrastructure players and webscale players, as well as where deployment is happening.

Architectural Variations of Converged Data Center Solutions

The future converged data center will include a wide range of physical infrastructure including converged appliances, new classes of servers, and storage and networking equipment. The value is in the software running and managing this collection of COTS or near-COTS hardware.

It’s best to look at a converged solution as a basket of different hardware functions supported by software management. Converged data center infrastructure solutions are typically sold as an integrated offering that consists of the following components:

•Server Functionality

•Networking Functionality

•Storage Functionality

•Management Software



The capabilities of each of these components varies based on the vendor and their approach to the market. This explains the varying terminology ranging from semi-converged to hyper converged as vendors make decisions about how much functionality to pack into one product offering.

Although the terms hyper converged and HCI have been broadly applied to many categories of solutions, convergence is in fact a spectrum of integrated capabilities in different combinations. We see them broken down into these combinations:

1. Converged Infrastructure (compute, storage, and networking) – Designed to deliver a shared infrastructure for server, storage, and network functionality. Examples include Cisco UCS, VCE Vblock, HPE ConvergedSystem and Lenovo Converged System (formerly PureFlex). Can also be customized for a specific vertical application (e.g. Oracle Exadata).

2. Converged Compute and Storage – Software-driven solutions that use standard x86 COTS servers to deliver compute and storage resources to replace regular storage area networks (SANs). Typically offer a number of storage management functions as part of their centralized management capabilities. Examples include Gridstore, Nimboxx, Nutanix, Pivot3, Scale Computing and SimpliVity. The industry often refers to such solutions as hyper converged or HCI products. They rely on virtualization software to drive convergence of commodity hardware.

3. White Boxes and Supporting Applications – To interconnect multiple HCI nodes often requires newer and more flexible approaches. Many webscale data centers end up using white boxes for their networking solutions. These white boxes use merchant silicon coupled with COTS platform to bridge and connect converged systems. While networking white boxes may not be full-blown HCI solutions today, they are an emerging category of networking device that can also provide compute capabilities. Built on COTS hardware, they are designed to replace proprietary gear for specific data center applications such as top of rack switching, analytics, message queuing and routing and even some application caching and acceleration functions.

FaceBook, Open Compute Project and ‘Webscale’ Architectures

Many of the large webscale players such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google have been instrumental in starting many trends in converged and hyper converged infrastructure. With requirements to massively scale their data centers very quickly, webscale players developed new architectures for networking, compute, and storage on COTS hardware.

In 2010–2011, a group of Facebook engineers organized a movement to create specifications for massively scalable, energy efficient data centers. Some of the engineering principles were used to build the massive Facebook data center in Prineville, Oregon. It resulted in Facebook building its own custom-designed servers, power supplies, server racks, and battery backup systems. All of the projects were focused on energy efficiency. Energy consumption can result in as much as 40–50% of the cost of a data center’s operations. Facebook said the Prineville facility consumed 38% less energy than Facebook’s previous facilities.

This initial engineering effort was expanded to become Open Compute Project (OCP), with a goal of creating sustainable and energy-efficient specs for hardware and data center design, for everything from servers, storage, and power supplies to mechanical systems. The specs are designed to be modular and scalable. This follows the concept of data-center disaggregation – the ability to build entire data centers based on open, interchangeable parts. The advantage of such a vision is speed of development, growth, and agility. The creation of standards helps suppliers lower costs by building standard parts with a single market in mind.

OCP is designed to make data center technologies open and more interoperable. It dovetails well with the SDx movement, which aims to define a set of open standards for networking software that can be loaded onto commodity hardware, a concept known in the industry as “white boxes.” Facebook says it has open-sourced every major physical component of its data center stack. The company claims it has saved $2 billion in infrastructure costs over last three years.



Google’s Influence on Converged Infrastructure

Google has been a leader in using COTS hardware and open source software to develop its own data center infrastructure, which is often converged or hyper converged. The company’s data and networking requirements have scaled so rapidly that it has been forced to craft new architectures to handle the massive increase in data needs.

Google has released information in snippets, including some of its code as open source. But recently, it has become more transparent in detailing its technology development. At Sigcomm in August 2015, Google published a paper revealing the most detailed description of its technology infrastructure, so far.

That paper includes these facts about data center demands:

•Bandwidth demands in the data center are doubling every 12 to 15 months

•Data-set sizes are continuing to explode with more photo/video content, logs, and the proliferation of Internet-connected sensors

•Web services can deliver higher-quality results by accessing more data on the critical path of individual requests

•Co-resident applications often share substantial data with one another in the same cluster; consider index generation, Web search, and serving ads

These characteristics require a data center that must scale faster than ever before. All along, Google has treated its data center and network as one virtualized supercomputing platform that can be managed with central control.

Google’s goal was not simply to rely on merchant silicon and commodity switching technology. It also wanted to devise a more efficient design for data center traffic, which typically includes many data exchanges within the data center, in an “East-West” pattern, rather than out of the data center, in a “North-South” pattern. Google popularized the use of the CLOS network topology, which it said “can scale to nearly arbitrary size” by adding switches in stages on a leaf/spine architecture (where “top-of-rack” switches aggregate traffic from a rack of servers and feed it into a non-blocking group of “spin” switches). In doing so, Google threw traditional notions out the window. Some of the common technologies you are hearing of now, including pervasive use of containers and Kubernetes, originated in Google data centers.

Because of Google’s continued influence on SDx infrastructure and open source, IT experts should follow developments closely to gain insights into the evolution of the industry. Many of Google’s developments can be followed at the Google research blog.

Where to Plug it In?

Not everybody is Google, and many of the commercial converged infrastructure products on the market are designed for those that who don’t have the resources to build custom webscale center architectures and software. There are a wide range of data center sizes, configurations, and needs that have a different requirement for converged infrastructure.

In our user survey, we asked whether organizations had deployed some sort of converged data center solution and where they deployed it. Not surprisingly, it turns out that it can be dependent on the size of the organization. While 58% of the users surveyed had deployed a converged solution, the numbers went up with the size of the organization. The larger the organization, the more likely they were to have deployed a converged solution. Seventy-five percent of service providers (100% of those who identified themselves as cloud service providers) and 66% of large enterprises had deployed some type of converged solution, while only 42% of small and medium businesses were using a converged data center solution. Only 42% of small and medium businesses were using a converged data center solution.

When asked to indicate all potential environments in which their organization is deploying or plans to deploy converged data center solutions, 55% of respondents identified their internal data centers; 50% their private

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/



clouds; 47% their hybrid clouds; and 25% their public cloud environments. Only 11% of respondents had no plans to deploy converged solutions at all.

Chapter 4: Market LandscapeIf you’re up for analyzing the competitive landscape and strategy of the many converged infrastructure and HCI vendors, this market offers the world’s fair. It’s a heated market with lots of growth and many companies pursuing the customer demand.

Organizations have plenty of options as they look to trial and deploy converged solution, which include products marketed by the world’s largest IT players. Many of the different vendors have subtle differences in their approaches, with the technology architecture deriving from their original heritage and technology resources (software, hardware, storage and management). In the end, what customers are looking for are technology partners that can deliver a converged data center infrastructure in a more cost-effective package than it would take to integrate the technology themselves.

Within converged infrastructures, there are differences in architectural solutions. For example, in storage, SAN vs NAS battles still play out and difference in approaches between FCoE (fiber channel over Ethernet), iSCSI, FCoIP

CONVeRgeD DaTa CeNTeR DeplOyMeNTS

60

50

40

30

20

10

0Internal

Data Center

55%

private Cloud

50%

Hybrid Cloud

47%

publicCloud

25%

Not planning

11%

sdxcentral.com



create different operational siloes. Some vendors preset the amount of storage and compute available, while others allow customization of resource allocation. Organizations should look closely at a solution’s capabilities to determine which are best for their use cases and overall environment.

With the merger of Dell and EMC driving much of the dynamics in this market, 2016 will prove to be a crucial year.

A Look at Market Leaders and Partnerships

Below, we summarize the strategies of the largest positions, but first, it might be worth looking at which organizations are perceived as leaders, according to our survey.

When asked in the SDxCentral Converged Infrastructure Survey, ‘Which vendors of converged infrastructure would or did you consider for your converged data center projects (check all that apply),’ Cisco (68%) and VMware (58%) were the clear leaders. EMC (25%), IBM (24%), and HPE (23%) were the only other vendors that were cited by more than a fifth of the participants.

When it came time to trial different vendor’s solutions, not surprisingly Cisco was cited most often (44%), followed by VMware (32%), IBM (14%), EMC (13%), HPE (11%), VCE (10%), and Dell (9%).

However, when it comes to deployments in production networks, 48% of survey respondents said they still hadn’t selected a solution. Of those that had, 32% deployed Cisco, 22% VMware, 10% IBM, 9% EMC, and 7% chose Dell and Ericsson. The scale of those deployments tends to be between 100–2000 nodes (36%), with only 6% running deployments with more than 10K nodes.

A quick look at some of the market leaders finds that many of them have a long history in this market. They may have found themselves in the converged data center infrastructure space out of necessity, looking to extend and enhance their offerings to meet emerging data center requirements and customer demands.

sdxcentral.com

CONVeRgeD INFRaSTRuCTuRe: VeNDORS CONSIDeReD

0 20% 40% 60% 80%

Hpe23%

VCe19%

eMC25%

IbM24%

Dell18%

Huawei13%

Nutanix13%

ericsson12%

SimpliVity7%

Netapp (w/Cisco)12%

4% lenovo

Oracle10%

Cisco68%

VMware58%

3% Scale Computing

2% pluribus Networks

2% Fujitsu

2% arista



Market Leaders: Converged and HCI Strategy

CiscoCisco was early in spotting the converged opportunity. Its Unified Computing System (UCS) has been in the market since 2009. It uses Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), which enables storage and IP protocols to run on a single cable transport and interface, to converge the traffic. With no native storage solutions, Cisco relies on external partners, such as Hitachi, IBM and Nimble Storage to fill out the architecture. The UCS Manager is the centralized control point for the converged resources, abstracting all the information from the UCS B-Series blades and/or C-Series rack-mountable systems that are deployed.

Cisco was originally an active partner in the VCE coalition, but that is expected to diminish now that VCE has been acquired by EMC/Dell. Cisco has worked to build out a robust ecosystem that can expand the capabilities of UCS. In addition to the aforementioned storage vendors, Cisco has built traction with integrations with NetApp and the FlexPod architecture. Cisco has started partnering with other HCI vendors, such as StorMagic, ScaleIO, Maxta, SimpliVity and provides integration with VMware Virtual SAN (vSAN) to provide a HCI solution hosted on UCS rack-optimized systems.

Cisco is one of the leaders in converged infrastructure deployments and has put together a smart and balanced strategy for all the components. The only recurring concern is on storage resources, for which Cisco has relied heavily on its partnership with NetApp. This is a close area to watch to see if Cisco makes an acquisition – perhaps NetApp or a storage-defined software startup.

As this report was going to press, Cisco announced its new HyperFlex line of servers on March 1. Cisco says that HyperFlex, which includes management software from partner Springpath, moves further towards hyper convergence by integrating storage and data services features into an already robust compute and networking platform.

DellDell – where to start? The company is in the process of subsuming EMC (including VMware) for one of the largest technology mergers in history. Therefore, it’s difficult to pinpoint a single Dell converged and hyper converged strategy because that would include all of the EMC, VMware, and VCE elements (all included in separate descriptions).

With its background in both servers and networking, Dell is a natural fit for having a converged infrastructure story. The current linchpin of its strategy – in addition to the merger with EMC – is a partnership with Nutanix to combine Nutanix software on Dell servers. This is an approach that makes sense, bringing Dell’s support, hardware and brand and combining with Nutanix’ software. This is similar to the concept of a “brite box” – or branded white box – in which an open, SDx approach to COTs hardware is augmented with the support and services of a major IT player.

Looking forward, it will be interesting to see what the Dell/EMC merger means for the partnership with Nutanix. Dell has a deep and wide portfolio of converged assets, but how it sorts out the series of combinations will be interesting to watch in 2016.

EMCEMC is a giant in the storage industry and it owns VMware, so it has all of the components of converged infrastructure and HCI. To confuse things, it also owns VCE and is being merged with Dell along with VMware – creating a giant company with massive convergence potential for networking, virtualization software, and hardware components.

EMC leans heavily on VMware software for creating converged and HCI solutions, including its VSPEX Blue product, which uses VMware’s VSAN. Look for a continued development and integration of EMC storage resources, Dell hardware and services, and VMware virtualization products.



HPEHPE built a converged infrastructure portfolio by assembling many different pieces of its portfolio, including storage from its 3Par SAN division, HP blade servers, HP networking gear, and its OpenView management software. The company has been active in this space and there have also been rumors that it would be looking to acquire a startup such as SimpliVity to augment its hyper convergence story.

IBMIBM has a strong position in virtualized storage, with Spectrum Accelerate software and its own storage appliances. It has been using a position in storage for the HCI market, though it’s been a bit low on visibility compared with the stories of Cisco, EMC (with VMware), and startups such as Nutanix and SimpliVity. Spectrum Accelerate is used on IBM’s cloud service, SoftLayer, to virtualize storage. IBM’s sale of its server business to Lenovo weakened its position in HCI, and it is primarily relying on partnership with Cisco on UCS to deliver full solutions.

VCEVCE was a leader in developing the converged infrastructure vision. The company was formed in 2009 as a partnership between Cisco, VMware, and EMC. The idea was to create a virtualized infrastructure that combines Cisco UCS servers, Cisco Nexus networking components, VMware software, and EMC storage systems. In 2015, VCE announced a new VxBlock converged infrastructure system which includes VMware’s NSX software-defined networking technology for the first time. It was initially only supported by Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI).

Questions remain about the VCE partnership, however, because VMware and EMC are being merged with Dell, which has its own converged infrastructure products and competes with Cisco in networking. Cisco has backed off from VCE, selling most of its stake to EMC/VMware in 2015, even though Cisco said last October that it still “pledges support” to VCE. It’s hard to see why Cisco would continue to support the effort once VMware, EMC and VCE are all owned by rival Dell. This all raises many question posed by the gigantic Dell/EMC merger, one of which is: With so many HCI products under the Dell umbrella, where will it consolidate its brand? In press reports, some resellers say it makes sense that VMware software will be combined with Dell hardware for HCI, replacing Cisco hardware.

VMware Inc.VMware is driving its hyper converged strategy by combining elements of vSphere virtualization platform and its Virtual SAN (VSAN) product. This includes marketing the software as part of integrated hardware appliances, including VMware’s recent VMware VxRail appliance which serves as an upgrade path from EVO:RAIL (VMware) / VSPEX Blue (EMC). VxRail is a fully integrated, preconfigured and tested HCI appliance powered by VMware’s Hyper-Converged Software.

The company says it makes these products available through “a broad and deep range of consumption options,” which means internal combinations as well as partnerships. VMware recently revealed that in Q4 of 2015, total VSAN bookings grew nearly 200% year over year, and customer count has increased to over 3000 versus over 1000 a year ago. The company says it is now has more than a $100 million annual run rate for total bookings.

VMware partners with many different hardware partners, including its majority-owned subsidiary, VCE, with EMC. When EVO:RAIL was first announced in 2014, partners included Dell, EMC, Inspur, NetOne, Fujitsu and SuperMicro. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Hitachi Data Systems were later added to the list. Last year, VMware also released a product more targeted at the HCI market, called EVO:SDDC, which adds network control. Given the recent large announcements and transactions – including VxRail, Dell’s purchase of EMC (which owns a majority of VMware) and the announcement that VMware would buy a majority of VCE, these partnerships are shifting rapidly. Once absorbed by Dell, we would expect that the HCI appliances will be marketed with Dell’s hardware using VMware software and EMC’s storage solutions.



Notable Converged and HCI Challengers & Startups

Emerging vendors challenging the more established vendors were leaders in the HCI market, building purpose-built software-and-appliance combinations that could be plugged in and used to scale the data center quickly. They are making quite a bit of noise in the market. The two most prominent HCI startups include Nutanix and SimpliVity.

Atlantis ComputingAtlantis Computing provides storage virtualization software, which it calls USX, to be loaded onto servers to create an HCI product. USX can pool network attached storage (NAS), SAN, or flash resources. OEM partners including IBM and Lenovo.

Originally a pure SDS play, Atlantis has seen the opportunity in HCI (or maybe its investors did) and in 2015 it launched its own HCI appliance, called HyperScale. The company recently stated that bookings grew 80% year-over-year in 2015.

Juniper Networks, Inc.Juniper is pursuing a “converged stack” strategy that can draw from its Contrail, MetaFabric Architecture, QFX, Contrail and SRX technology lines to create converged infrastructure solutions targeted at specific applications such as networking and security. One example is its vSRX virtual firewall, which can be deployed as a converged security solution on COTS hardware in cloud environments. Contrail is the primary control platform, which can automate and orchestrate compute, storage, and networking resources on an open, converged COTS hardware platform. Juniper is also partnering with Nutanix to deliver a converged solution that combines Nutanix’ compute & storage platform with Juniper’s Virtual Chassis Fabric and firewall offerings.

NutanixNutanix has been gathering momentum with its converged infrastructure offering, which it calls the Xtreme Computing Platform, targeted at webscale architectures by integrating server and storage resources into turnkey appliances. Its appliances are run by this Acropolis virtualization software, which controls compute and storage. It is often cited as a leader in the space, including mention on the vaunted upper-right of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

Nutanix focuses on scalability and speed of deployment, saying its products can be deployed in just 30 to 60 minutes and run applications at any scale. All of its products run on standard, x86 COTS servers. Nutanix recently filed for an IPO and its OEM partners including Brocade, Dell, and Lenovo. In its IPO filing in December of 2015, Nutanix revealed revenues of $241 million for the year ended July 2015 up from $127 million the previous year and way up from $6.6 million in fiscal 2012. But it was also losing money – to the tune of $126 million for the fiscal year ending last July and a total accumulated deficit of $312 million since being founded in 2009.

Pivot3Pivot3 recently acquired NexGen Storage, a privately held leading provider of hybrid storage appliances and dynamic all-flash arrays. Pivot3 provides software and hardware solutions in the form of its vSTAC OS software (which leverages VMware vSphere 6.0) and its All-Flash Enterprise HCI appliances which are hyper-converged data center nodes with converged compute and all-flash storage. Its global HCI solutions allow sharing of resources across nodes. And as a result of the acquisition, Pivot3 has folded NexGen Storage’s into its current offering, leveraging unique QoS (quality of service) capabilities to improve application performance.

Scale ComputingScale Computing markets the HC3 and HC3x hyper converged platforms, competing with both Nutanix and SimpliVity in the startup world. It is looking to differentiate its offering by focusing on the open source KVM hypervisor, which simplifies and potentially reduces costs on hypervisor licensing, which is a major gripe among those buying solutions from the big-name vendors.



SimpliVitySimpliVity also provides a HCI solution, combining storage, compute, and applications such as WAN optimization on COTS hardware. The company has been touting their advantages over public cloud offerings, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), citing a report by Evaluator Group that found SimpliVity’s HyperConverged Infrastructure offers a 22% to 49% savings over AWS. It markets its own OmniCube family of appliances as well as packaging its OmniStack software with hardware partners such as Cisco and Lenovo.

HCI Networking Solutions – White Box Switches and More

Most HCI solutions today focus on preconfigured compute nodes, or on combining compute and storage, utilizing software to create a storage system from compute nodes coupled with flash arrays or spinning disks. As HCI architectures develop, we expect to see more investments in R&D on the networking front. Regardless, leading data centers (such as those from Google, Facebook and other web giants) recognize the need to increase connectivity between the various nodes today and have turned to white boxes coupled with intelligence to accelerate the process.

Entrants in HCI networking solutions include networking functions built into HCI infrastructure solutions from Cisco (UCS + Nexus), EMC/VMware (vCenter + vSphere + vSAN + NSX) and other infrastructure vendors. We also view white box and network virtualization vendors such as Pluribus Networks and Big Switch Networks as significant players in converged data centers, providing flexible connectivity options between converged hardware nodes.

Big Switch Networks, Inc.Big Switch Networks develops and sells network virtualization solutions for data centers. Their Big Cloud Fabric is used in hyperscale data centers, providing converged infrastructure with a unified networking fabric across physical and virtual networks through the use of whitebox and britebox switches. It has been a strong partner with Dell, which is using Big Switch software on server hardware to build converged solutions. Other partners on the hardware side include Accton.

Pluribus NetworksPluribus Networks provides a Virtualization-Centric Fabric architecture that works as a strong foundation for converged data centers. Pluribus VCF provides increased visibility into the application traffic flows in these converged data centers, allow for improved application optimization and troubleshooting. Pluribus has built a converged solution using its own hardware platform as well as integrating its software with partners to develop hardware solutions. Key partners include Dell, Nutanix, and Supermicro.



Vendor Profiles The following sections profile many of the vendors in the converged data center market. The individual profiles were created through a collaborative effort between SDNCentral’s Research Team and the Vendor’s product experts. SDNCentral worked under the assumption the information provided by the vendors was factual, auditing the submissions only to remove unverifiable claims and hyperbole. Extended profiles can be viewed online.

While every attempt has been made to validate the capabilities listed in the profiles, SDNCentral advises end users to verify the veracity of each claim for themselves in their actual deployment environments. SDNCentral cannot be held liable for unexpected operations, damages or incorrect operation due to any inaccuracies listed here. SDNCentral welcomes feedback and additional information from end users based on their real-world experiences with the products and technologies listed. The SDNCentral research team can be reached at [email protected].

https://www.sdxcentral.com/reports/converged-data-center

mailto:research%40sdxcentral.com?subject=

category:Market Report | The Future of the Converged Data Center


FEATURED


Juniper Converged Stack Solutions (Click for Online Version)

http://juni.pr/1Ta5s13

Description of Product and Its Differentiation: Converged stacks aim to address the problem of provisioning data centers by allowing enterprises to purchase a plug-and-play, preconfigured data center in a rack. While that sounds good, most converged stacks today are vertically integrated, locked-in solutions from a single supplier. This is where Juniper and our partners come in. We are solving this problem in a different way with a range of flexible and open choices that allow customers to get the simplicity of a converged stack leveraging open, best in class technology. Juniper and our partners are building a business around putting together best of breed cloud stacks built on Juniper’s MetaFabric reference framework with QFX, Contrail and SRX product lines.

1133 Innovation Way Sunnyvale, CA 94089

[email protected]

JUNIPER NETWoRkS, INC.

Hypervisors Supported Raid Storage Support

ESXi, KVM, Hyper-V, Xen Yes

Network Virtualization Features and Capacity

Based on the principles of SDN, Contrail leverages BGP signaled end-system IP/VPNs to implement network virtualization overlays. These standards-based overlays, which span cloud boundaries, deliver a vendor-neutral approach for creating multitenant virtualized, containerized and bare-metal cloud environments. Infrastructure analytics and visualization features provide insight into virtual and physical networks, simplifying operations and decision making with proactive planning and predictive diagnostic capabilities. Please visit: www.opencontrail.org/evaluating-opencontrail-virtual-router-performance

Partners

Atos Networks, FusionStorm, Intervision, InterCloud Systems, ITQAN, Redapt, Technica, Virtual Armor

Security Features

The SRX Series and vSRX firewalls are high-performance security platforms featuring open and programmable APIs for automation, offering application security, Intrusion Prevention, UTM, and cloud-based anti-malware. At 17 Gbps throughput, the vSRX is the industry’s fastest and most efficient virtual firewall, enabling the deployment of scalable security services in cloud environments. The vSRX is also integrated with Contrail and other third-party plug-ins for orchestration in SDN environments. For more information, please visit www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/security.

Compute and Storage Features

Compute and storage resources are provided by our partners. For more information, please contact Juniper at [email protected].

Licensing/Pricing

Please contact Juniper Networks at [email protected] for pricing information.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/reports/converged-data-center/chapter-5-product-categories


http://juni.pr/1Ta5s13

http://www.juniper.net

mailto:converged-stacks%40juniper.net?subject=

http://www.opencontrail.org/evaluating-opencontrail-virtual-router-performance

http://www.opencontrail.org/evaluating-opencontrail-virtual-router-performance

http://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/security





FEATURED

Big Cloud Fabric (v3.5) (Click for Online Version)

www.bigswitch.com/sdn-products/big-cloud-fabrictm

Description of Product: Big Cloud Fabric™ is the industry’s first unified physical & virtual data center networking fabric built using whitebox or britebox switches and SDN controller technology. Embracing hyperscale data center design principles, Big Cloud Fabric enables rapid innovation, ease of provisioning, and management, while reducing overall costs, making it ideal for current and next generation data centers.

3965 Freedom Circle, Suite 300 Santa Clara, CA 95054

www.bigswitch.com650.714.4564

BIG SWITCH NETWoRkS, INC

Date of Initial Release

August 2014

Hypervisors Supported

ESXi, KVM, Hyper-V, Xen

RAID Storage Support

Yes

Product Differentiation

Big Cloud Fabric network controller is integrated with OpenStack and VMware (vSphere and NSX) data center deployments — providing a single pane of glass management and operational workflow. IT organizations get OpEx benefits (10x reduction), including an application/tenant-centric configuration to streamline all networking configuration, management, and troubleshooting. Bare metal or whitebox hardware reduces 3-year infrastructure costs by over 50%.

Compute Features and Capacity

A flexible, scale-out design that lets you to start at the size/scale needed with room to grow. Typical pod deployment scenarios:• Unified P+V SDN for OpenStack Clouds• VMware Data Centers — vSphere, NSX or VIO• High Performance Computing• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Pods• Specialized NFV Pods


Supports both physical and virtual (multi-hypervisor) workloads and choice of orchestration software - VMware vSphere or OpenStack . Provides L2 switching, L3 routing, and L4-7 service insertion and chaining while ensuring high bisectional bandwidth.

Storage Features and Capacity

Big Cloud Fabric is designed from the ground up to satisfy the requirements of physical, virtual or combination of physical, and virtual workloads. These include big data and software defined storage Pods.

Security Features

• Crypto-secure communications controller and data center fabric

• Full visibility into data center traffic with Analytics module (inbuilt)

• Integrated security tool chaining• Standard network security features include: Layer 3

and 4 ACLs: IPv4, ICMP, TCP/UDP etc.

Partners

Dell, VMware, Red Hat, Mirantis, Accton, Palo Alto Networks, F5 Networks, A10 Networks

3rd-party Integrations

Big Cloud Fabric Controller natively supports integration with various Cloud Management Platforms including VMware, Red Hat OpenStack, and Citirix CloudStack. This is done through a single programmatic interface, which is simpler and scalable compared to box-by-box networking.

Customers

Clemson University, U2 Cloud, CleanSafeCloud


BIG CLOUD FABRIC



http://www.bigswitch.com/sdn-products/big-cloud-fabrictm

http://www.bigswitch.com



FEATURED


Pluribus Freedom Series F64-FL1T (Click for Online Version)

www.pluribusnetworks.com/products/freedom-spine-switches

Description of Product: Best-in-class networking functionality with a unique combination of router, switch, compute, and storage designed to run fabric switching along with converged network services and high-perfor-mance analytics directly into the fabric. It can be used to build the Spine layer of the Leaf-Spine architecture. Powered by the Netvisor® operating system, built on the Pluribus Virtualization-Centric Fabric architecture, the F64-FL1T switch can create a distributed controller, tap-less network fabric.

2455 Faber Place, Suite 100 Palo Alto, CA 94303

www.pluribusnetworks.com855.GET.VNET

PLURIBUS NETWoRkS

Date of Initial Release Hypervisors Supported

May 2014 KVM

Product Differentiation

Can scale to a number of nodes and server ports much larger than any existing fabric technology without imposing any restriction on the network topology, in-band or out-of-band connectivity and topological distance between nodes. No master node roles, external controllers nor NMS tools. Control and visibility of the entire fabric is possible by connecting to any switch, eliminating single points of failure while automating control and analytics. Application flows are recognized for any endpoint.


The dual socket Xeon E5 with up to 16 cores and up to 256 GB of RAM give these switches enormous amount of compute power.


• Virtual Network (VNET) Provisioning, Management and Segmentation

• Multi-tenancy/Role-Based Access• Virtual Networks (VNETs) with L3-7 services

including vRouters


The switch’s 240 GB of internal storage can be extended up 3.84 TB of external storage through 4 SSD slots. The storage options can be used as a Network DVR enabling NetOps to analyze networking transactions for deep forensic analysis by going back up to 3 years of networking metadata

Security Features

• Fabric-wide segmentation• Mgmt, Control + Data Plane isolation• Per VNET/tenant services e.g. Virtual Routing w/HW

switch offload• No proprietary underlay protocols• VM/bare metal orch. agnostic• Fabric-wide flow classification + flow policy enforcement• Flow capture, drop, redirect to security tools

Partners

Dell - www.pluribusnetworks.com/dellEricsson - www.pluribusnetworks.com/ericssonTechnology Partners - www.pluribusnetworks.com/partners/technology-partnersSolution Partners - www.pluribusnetworks.com/partners/solution-partners

3rd-party Integrations

www.pluribusnetworks.com/partners/technology-partners

Customers

www.pluribusnetworks.com/resources/case-studieswww.pluribusnetworks.com/about/customers

Licensing/Pricing

The Pluribus Freedom F64-FL1T licensing involves:• Pluribus Enterprise Fabric – includes all traditional

Layer-2, Layer-3 protocols, QoS and network management features plus Fabric Automation and Fabric Visibility feature sets.

• Fabric Visibility - this feature set has application flows across the entire fabric plus a Time Machine (aka Network DVR).

• Fabric Virtualization – this additional license is to support virtualization for an unlimited number of fabric nodes.

http://go4.pluribusnetworks.com/rs/325-QWU-978/images/Pluribus-Freedom-F-Series-Switches-datasheet.pdf



http://www.pluribusnetworks.com/products/freedom-spine-switches

http://www.pluribusnetworks.com

http://www.pluribusnetworks.com/dell/

http://www.pluribusnetworks.com/ericsson/

http://www.pluribusnetworks.com/partners/technology-partners/


http://www.pluribusnetworks.com/partners/solution-partners

http://www.pluribusnetworks.com/partners/solution-partners



http://www.pluribusnetworks.com/resources/case-studies/

http://www.pluribusnetworks.com/about/customers/







Cisco Converged Infrastructure Solutions (Click for online version)

www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/data-center-virtualization/ucs-integrated-infrastructure/index.html

Description of Product: Cisco has converged and hyper converged infrastructure solutions with software-defined computing, networking and storage. Cisco delivers solutions with storage partners, such as FlexPod, Vblock, VersaStack, and SmartStack. With HyperFlex Systems, Cisco is now addressing hyper convergence with a platform fully integrated into UCS management. According to IDC, Cisco’s converged infrastructure solutions represent nearly 50% of the installed solutions.

CISCo SySTEMS, INC.www.cisco.com




With service profiles, IT can define a server in software and apply that to the underlying hardware. This dramatically simplifies configuration and management of the infrastructure. SingleConnect simplifies the overall networking fabric, simplifying the cable plant while delivering high performance.


ACI, Cisco’s SDN solution, is integrated into all converged infrastructure solutions. With ACI, you can extend policies from the converged and hyper converged infrastructure into the network, including security, QoS and load balancing.


For our converged infrastructure solutions, we leverage a broad range of our partner’s storage features and capabilities. For hyperconverged HyperFlex Systems, we deliver software designed to provide custom built, log structured file system with flash, de-dup and compression as foundational elements

Security Features

Our converged infrastructure solutions integrate secure multi-tenancy in order to securely segment and firewall different applications from each other. This is critical in a private cloud environment. Additionally, ACI extends security policies from the server and storage into the network.

Dell Converged Solutions (Click for online version)

www.dell.com/en-us/work/learn/converged-solutions

Description of Product: Dell offers variants of both converged solutions, built on Dell’s PowerEdge FX architecture, PowerEdge VRTX, and the PowerEdge M1000e blade enclosures, and hyper converged solutions, which are available on Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO:RAIL and the Dell XC Series powered by Nutanix.

DELLwww.dell.com


ESXi, Hyper-V, Dell XC Series solutions support Nutanix Acropolis hypervisors.


Dell offers high compute densities based on Intel Xeon processors across multiple converged offerings but are designed as single hyperscale platform that runs lighter-threaded and heavier-threaded workloads equally well from a single architecture


Dell offers open networking and management choices and options on multiple solutions to avoid vendor lock-in even on converged solution offerings.

Customers

www.dell.com/learn/us/en/uscorp1/customer-stories#!facets=technology-type-server-virtualization&p=1&keyword=Converged


Multiple systems from Dell support new storage paradigms based on local storage such as software-defined storage, VMware’s vSAN and Microsoft’s Storage Spaces.

Security Features

Dell employs best in class security practices on converged solutions such as utilizing VMware’s NSX that provides a complete suite of simplified logical networking elements and services, including logical switches, routers, rewalls, load balancers, VPN, QoS, monitoring and security.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/reports/converged-data-center/chapter-5-product-categories/


http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/data-center-virtualization/ucs-integrated-infrastructure/index.html

http://www.cisco.com



http://www.dell.com/en-us/work/learn/converged-solutions

http://www.dell.com

http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/uscorp1/customer-stories#!facets=technology-type-server-virtualization&p=1&keyword=Converged






Ericsson Hyperscale Datacenter System 8000 (Click for online version)

http://www.ericsson.com/ourportfolio/products/hyperscale-datacenter-system-8000

Description of Product: Ericsson Hyperscale Datacenter System 8000 is a new generation of data center systems using disaggregated hardware architecture for better resource utilization. The initial focus is on complete operator cloud transformation for network functions virtualization (NFV), IT and commercial cloud operations. It is a high performance, resource optimized platform to bring hyperscale infrastructure practice to all service providers.

ERICSSoNwww.ericsson.com


ESXi, KVM, Hyper-V, Xen, Ubuntu 14.04, RHEL 6.5/7, CentOS 7, Oracle VM/Linux7, SLES 12, WindRiver Linux 7, MontaVista Linux CGE 7


Optically connected to 4x10 GE for networking and 8x12 Gbps SAS for storage. Additional 4X10 or 4X25 GE available. Dual socket Haswell and Broadwell (as soon as released from Intel) support with up to 3 TB RAM. TPM for security. Dual 2.5” drives with SATA or PCIe interface.


Hardware accelerated VTEP in switch fabric. Overlay network analytics. Fully configurable overlay using OVSDB. Switch fabric can be partitioned in multiple VPODs, each using different SDN controllers.


Disaggregated drives (JBOD) in combination with optical interconnect and software management and provisioning provide a very scalable infrastructure for storage. This infrastructure enables solutions like Secure Cloud Storage or other software defined solutions. (File, Block, Object storage).

Security Features

Integrated with Ericsson KSI security solution. Provides real time integrity and monitoring of all key system infrastructure assets, e.g. network configuration, firmware images and AAA systems. VPOD security framework allows users to assigned resources.

Fujitsu Primergy Servers & Primeflex vShape reference architecture (Click for online version)

www.fujitsu.com/fts/products/computing/servers/primergy

Description of Product: Fujitsu Primergy and Fujitsu Primequet servers are part of the Primeflex vShape reference architecture which is a virtualization and private cloud reference architecture that integrates Fujitsu Eternus and NetApp FAS storage platforms with best-of-breed third-party technologies. All these components are synchronized and validated as a single solution.

FUJITSUwww.fujitsu.com




Primeflex vShape provides solutions for various workloads starting at 25 VMs up to 200 VMs and utilizes Primergy servers that use PSUs with up to 96% energy efficiency. Capacity is based on servers and storage systems and is complete with integrated features such as high availability and security.


Fujitsu’s Primeflex vShape reference architecture utilizes Fujitsu Primergy Blade Servers and Brocade VCS Fabric technology to deliver virtualized integrated solutions.

Customers

www.fujitsu.com/fts/products/computing/integrated-systems/vshape.html


Fujitsu Server Primergy and Fujitsu Storage Eternus are optimized for server virtualization and cloud and Fujitsu’s technology partners are integrated into the Fujitsu Integrated System. Examples include Primeflex for VMware EVO:RAIL, Primeflex for VMware VSAN or Primeflex for Cluster-in-a-box.

Security Features

As a part of the FUJITSU vShape architecture adminis-trators can use multiple management consoles to moni-tor performance and security such as VMware’s vCenter.



http://www.ericsson.com/ourportfolio/products/hyperscale-datacenter-system-8000

http://www.ericsson.com




http://www.fujitsu.com/fts/products/computing/servers/primergy

http://www.fujitsu.com

http://www.fujitsu.com/fts/products/computing/integrated-systems/vshape.html

http://www.fujitsu.com/fts/products/computing/integrated-systems/vshape.html




HPE Hyper-Converged 250 (Click for online version)

www.hpe.com/us/en/integrated-systems/hyper-converged.html

Description of Product: HPE’s hyper converged system is built on industry standard HPE Proliant servers. It is a compact 2U/4-node virtualized platform with compute and resilient storage managed as one unit from a single interface and optimized to handle a variety of workloads from on-demand IT infrastructure to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). High availability, data protection, and back-up and recovery capabilities are built into the hyper converged solution.

HEWLETT PACkARD ENTERPRISE (HPE)www.hpe.com


ESXi, Hyper-V


The system offers the choice of processors from 2x Intel E5-2640 v3/8-core @ 2.6 GHz or 2x Intel E5-2680 v3/12-core @ 2.5 GHz. Further, it can be configured with 128 GB, 256 GB or 512 GB DDR4 memory.


Each system contains four nodes; each node has an independent ESXi (or Hyper-V) host running on it. Therefore, one StoreVirtual system with four hosts is the minimum number of hosts. By adding additional systems (up to eight), the HP CS 250HC StoreVirtual scales up to 32 hosts.

Customers

http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/networking/library/customer-success/successes.aspx


The system has either 1.2 TB 6G 10K SFF Dual-port SAS Drive or 1.6 TB, 800 GB, 400 GB Solid State Drive, depend-ing on model. It has a capacity of up to 38 TB maximum included and 15 TB maximum useable storage space.

Security Features

The HC-250 supports all the security features offered in VMWare vSphere or in Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard (Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter, Hyper-V, System Center, System Center Operations Manager, System Center Virtual Machine Manager) depending on the configuration.

Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Portfolio (Click for online version)

https://www.hds.com/products/converged-infrastructure/hitachi-unified-compute-platform

Description of Product: Hitachi UCP is a fully integrated, pre-validated platform family that incorporates server, storage, networking, virtualization, and management software to support IT workloads and distributed environments. It supports applications, such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. It’s offered in multiple packages that include UCP 6000, UCP 4000, UCP 2000, UCP 1000 for VMware EVO:RAIL, and UCP Select.

HITACHI DATA SySTEMS (HDS)www.hds.com


ESXi, Hyper-V


Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Director, a key component of Hitachi UCP, is an infrastructure orchestration software solutions that is natively embedded into VMware vCenter or Microsoft Systems Center which aims to increase day-to-day operational efficiency.


Hitachi Data Systems and Cisco certify each component of a UCP solution for interoperability. Using only tested and validated components, UCP Select for VMware vSphere with Cisco UCS is a Cisco Validated Design (CVD), which aims to reduce the risk of introducing new technologies to data centers.


HDS UCP is designed around Hitachi Virtual Storage (VSP) Platforms, Unified Storage VM (HUS VM), Unified Storage (HUS), and NAS Platform (HNAS). Additionally, UCP utilizes Cisco Unified Fabric network and UCS. These compute, network and storage resources are natively integrated with VMware vSphere.

Security Features

HDS UCP solutions are multi vendor and utilize multiple layers of security for each component of storage, network, and server management. HDS UCP solutions are designed for private cloud environments with the necessary Integrated security and identity components built in.


https://www.hpe.com/us/en/integrated-systems/hyper-converged.html

https://www.hpe.com





https://www.hds.com/products/converged-infrastructure/hitachi-unified-compute-platform

http://www.hds.com




FusionCube (Click for online version)

http://e.huawei.com/en/products/cloud-computing-dc/servers/fusioncube/fusioncube

Description of Product: Huawei FusionCube is an integrated solution designed to simplify deployment of virtualized IT infrastructure. It features converged computing, storage, and networking, with an automated virtualization and management system. The resulting system improves application and business efficiency beyond what was previously possible.

HUAWEI TECHNoLoGIES Co., LTD.www.huawei.com/en


ESXi, KVM, Huawei FusionSphere


FusionCube 9000: 4U with 8 nodes: 32CPU, 12TB memory, 172TB storage. FusionCube 6000:4 U with 4 nodes: 8 CPUs, 4 TB memory, 288 TB storage


FusionCube 9000: converged network switch in a chassis, support GE, 10GE, FC and FCoE

Customers

China Sinopec, Infocast of Hongkong, Saudi TVTC, China Mobile, CNPC


FusionCube 9000: 4U with 8 nodes: 172TB storage. FusionCube 6000: 4 U with 4 nodes: 288 TB storage

Security Features

Classification authority management

Licensing/Pricing


IBM Pure Systems (Click for online version)

www.ibm.com/ibm/puresystems/us/en

Description of Product: IBM PureSystems consist of an IBM PureFlex System that combines compute, storage, networking, virtualization and management into a single power-based or hybrid system, optimized for cloud, to deliver infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). The IBM PureApplication automates the process for both on-premises and off-premises cloud operations, and IBM PureData System provides analytics, powered by Netezza technology, for managing the data warehouse.

IBMwww.ibm.com


ESXi, KVM, Hyper-V, Xen, PowerVM


IBM PureApplication System is available in three classes: 1) W1500-32 and W1500-64, using Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors, housed in a 25U rack. 2) W1500-96 through to W1500-608, using Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors, housed in a 42U rack. 3) W1700-96 through to W1700-608, using IBM POWER7+ processors


IBM Flex System FC3171 8Gb SAN Switch provides uncontested “wire speed” bandwidth at every port a total of 320 Gbps per switch with less than 4 ms fabric latency.

Customers

www.ibm.com/ibm/puresystems/us/en/case-studies/index.html


PureFlex systems use the IBM Storwize V7000 storage solution with 20 expansion enclosures attached using high-performance 12 Gbps SAS for maximum expansion of 504 drives or approximately 2 PB of capacity.

Security Features

IBM PureFlex System uses LDAP (or Active Directory, or AD) security to manage user accounts, LDAP functionality is now the center point of the PureFlex System security model.





http://www.huawei.com/en





http://www.ibm.com/ibm/puresystems/us/en

http://www.ibm.com

http://www.ibm.com/ibm/puresystems/us/en/case-studies/index.html

http://www.ibm.com/ibm/puresystems/us/en/case-studies/index.html




Lenovo Converged Systems (Click for online version)

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/systems/converged-systems

Description of Product: Lenovo offers both converged and hyper converged infrastructure solutions built on Lenovo servers including Lenovo Flex Systems servers, Lenovo ThinkServer servers, or the Lenovo HX Converged Appliances. Lenovo hyper converged solutions include Prism management software by Nutanix for HX Series appliances; where Lenovo EMC VSPEX converged solutions utilize VMware and reference architectures and EMC storage system that have jointly been tested, sized, and proven by Lenovo and EMC.

LENoVowww.lenovo.com


ESXi, Hyper-V, Lenovo HX solutions support Nutanix Acropolis hypervisors.


Lenovo servers utilize Intel Xeon processors with various configurations of the multiple families available. HX Series appliances scale up to 36 cores and 40 Terra Bytes in a 2U platform; whereas Lenovo Flex Servers use a modular book design with up to 18% faster performance than previous versions.


Lenovo converged systems for infrastructure can support Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI, or native Fibre Channel. All networking resources are preconfigured, tested and and optimized.

Customers

Not publicly available.


Lenovo EMC VSPEX Solutions integrate with EMC VNX/VNXe series storage solutions which support up to up to 1500 drives utilizing either unified storage (file and/or block), as a flash only configuration or as a hybrid flash array with mixed pools (mixture of SSDs and and HDDs).

Security Features

EMC Avamar Data Protection solutions provide data protection for VMware Horizon View data, and RSA SecurID provides optional secure user-authentication functionality.

FlexPod Solutions (Click for online version)

www.netapp.com/us/solutions/flexpod/index.aspx

Description of Product: FlexPod Datacenter validated solutions combine storage, networking, and server components into a single architecture for enterprise workloads. Solution components include NetApp clustered Data ONTAP and MetroCluster software, NetApp traditional and All-Flash FAS unified scale-out storage systems, Cisco Unified Computing Systems (Cisco UCS) servers, including UCS Mini, Cisco Nexus 5000, 6000, 7000, and 9000 Series Switches, and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure.

NETAPPwww.netapp.com




FlexPods are built on Cisco’s Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) and deploy high performance, expanded memory server architectures.


FlexPods are built on Cisco Nexus switching: Converges Fibre Channel and Ethernet on a unified 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabric.

Customers

University of São Paulo, WD-40, The Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group


FlexPods are built on NetApp storage providing storage access through Network File System (NFS) and Common Internet File System (CIFS) using Small Computer System Interface over IP (iSCSI) or Fibre Channel over 10 Gigabit.

Security Features

FlexPods can enable solutions to operate across hybrid cloud resources with the software-defined capabilities of NetApp Data Fabric, while maintaining security, control and workload portability with Cisco Intercloud Fabric.



http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/systems/converged-systems

http://www.lenovo.com


http://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/flexpod/index.aspx

http://www.netapp.com




Nimboxx (Click for online version)

www.nimboxx.com/product

Description of Product: Nimboxx provides a “single box” described as a powerful hyper converged infrastructure solution that includes compute, storage, networking and orchestration capabilities. The solution consists of a VDI server and a capacity based compute and virtualization server.

NIMBoxx, INC.www.nimboxx.com


KVM


Nimboxx provides 3 server options: AU-110 with 64GB of memory and 24vCores and 4.8TB of storage, the AU-110x which upgrades to 256 GB of memory and 32vCores and 9.6TB of storage, and the AU-120x which increases storage to 14.4 TB of storage.


KVM based virtualization.

Customers

Not Provided


Storage includes a tiered flash for SSD and then raw storage for improved performance.

Security Features

Not Applicable

Licensing/Pricing

Pricing is per device acquired and ranges from $24,995 to $45,995 without support. Support plans are listed www.nimboxx.com/support

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance (Click for online version)

www.oracle.com/servers/private-cloud-appliance

Description of Product: Oracle Private Cloud Appliance, formerly named Virtual Compute Appliance, simplifies the way customers install, deploy, and manage converged infrastructures for Linux, Windows, or Oracle Solaris applications.

oRACLEwww.oracle.com


Oracle VM


Compute nodes include Oracle Server X5-2 systems with Intel Xeon CPUs, high-speed dual inline memory modules (DIMM), redundant 40 Gb/sec InfiniBand host channel adapters (HCAs), and redundant disks. The base rack can support a maximum of 25 compute nodes.


Oracle SDN dynamically connects servers to networks and storage. It eliminates the physical storage and networking cards found in every server and replaces them with virtual network interface cards (vNICs) and virtual host bus adapters (vHBAs) that can be deployed on the fly.

Customers

www.oracle.com/servers/private-cloud-appliance/customer-successes.html


Oracle Private Cloud Appliance features a fully integrated, enterprise grade Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3 ES for centrally storing the management environment as well as providing data storage for VMs.

Security Features

Oracle Fabric Interconnect offers extremely low latency (typically 10X faster speeds than Ethernet), 40 Gb/sec throughput, full redundancy, and integrated endpoint security.



http://www.nimboxx.com/product

http://www.nimboxx.com

https://www.nimboxx.com/support



https://www.oracle.com/servers/private-cloud-appliance

http://www.oracle.com

https://www.oracle.com/servers/private-cloud-appliance/customer-successes.html

https://www.oracle.com/servers/private-cloud-appliance/customer-successes.html




FlashStack Converged Infrastructure (Click for online version)

www.purestorage.com/solutions/infrastructure/flashstack.html

Description of Product: FlashStack CI is a flexible, all-flash converged infrastructure solution. It combines compute, network, storage hardware and virtualization software, into a single, integrated architecture. FlashStack CI is available from accredited FlashStack Partners who help provide an excellent converged infrastructure ownership experience.

PURE SToRAGEwww.purestorage.com


ESXi


The FlashStack CI compute resources are built out of Cisco Nexus Switches, a Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect, and Cisco UCS-B Series Blade Servers. Each system is custom built to client specifications.


The FlashStack CI virtualization is controlled by VMWare’s vSphere software. vSphere offers high availability, fault tolerance, data protection, API’s, and many other virtualization features that can be found at https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMW-vSPHR-Datasheet-6-0.pdf

Customers

Nielsen, LinkedIn, SkullCandy, UT-Dallas, and others can be seen at www.purestorage.com/customers.html


The FlashStack CI uses the Pure Storage //m400 flash storage array. Each storage chassis can support from 2-70 TB of raw capacity or 35TB to over 200TB of effective capacity. Multiple chassis can be added to a FlashStack CI system depending on customer configuration.

Security Features

The FlashStack CI utilizes the Cisco/VMware/Microsoft integrated features to provide security. It does not have any special security features beyond what is provided by the individual components from other vendors.

SolidFire Agile Infrastructure (AI) (Click for online version)

www.solidfire.com/solutions/agile-infrastructure

Description of Product: SolidFire AI is a series of converged infrastructure designs that are thoroughly tested and validated. SolidFire AI takes a best-of-breed approach to build converged infrastructure, combining SolidFire’s scale-out storage system with leading compute, networking and orchestration technologies from VMware, Cisco, Dell, and Red Hat to provide cloud infrastructure solutions for enterprise-class data centers.

SoLIDFIREwww.solidfire.com


ESXi


The SolidFire AI can be built on a Cisco or Dell reference architecture. The SolidFire AI platform can support up to 360 cores and 4TB of RAM.


The SolidFire AI system uses VMWare vSphere for its virutalization management. The Cisco based architecture can host up to 2500 virtual machines, while the Dell architecture can host up to 1,000 virtual machines.

Customers

California Public Utilities Commission, Sungard, Colt, 1&1, Ultimate Software and other customer success stories can be found at www.solidfire.com/about/customers


The SolidFire AI system uses SolidFire’s SF series flash storage devices. Up to 10 slots per system are available per storage. The system can provide up to 40TB capcity.

Security Features

The SolidFire AI system uses the integrated security features provided by VMware, Cisco, Dell, and RedHat. This provides a best-of-breed approach towards securing the system.



http://www.purestorage.com/solutions/infrastructure/flashstack.html

https://www.purestorage.com

https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMW-vSPHR-Datasheet-6-0.pdf

https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMW-vSPHR-Datasheet-6-0.pdf

http://www.purestorage.com/customers.html



http://www.solidfire.com/solutions/agile-infrastructure

http://www.solidfire.com

http://www.solidfire.com/about/customers




VBlock and VxBlock (Click for online version)

www.vce.com/converged-infrastructure

Description of Product: VCE brings together best-of-breed technologies from technology leaders like Cisco, EMC, VMware, and more in converged Vblock Systems and VxBlock Systems solutions to power data centers and simplify management and operations throughout the system lifecycle. The Vblock and VxBlock converged systems are managed by VCI Vision Intelligent Operations, which manages compute, storage, network and virtualization components together as a single system and multiple systems as a single pool of resources.

VCEwww.vce.com

IntelliStack Converged Infrastructure (Click for online version)

www.tegile.com/solutions/intellistack

Description of Product: IntelliStack is comprised of VMware Horizon View 6, VMware vSphere 5, Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), and the Tegile Intelligent Flash Storage Array. It allows customers to acquire and build a whole converged infrastructure at one time. A single SKU includes everything, such as servers, flash storage and networking. IntelliStack offers pre-validated, pre-sized, and certified configurations to fit a wide range of deployment requirements.

TEGILEwww.tegile.com


ESXi


Compute resources on the IntelliStack are provided by Cisco UCS blade servers. These servers are based on multi-core, Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 and E5-2600 v2 product families CPUs, for up to 24 processing cores per server.


Network virtualization on Intellistack is provided by VMware Horizon View 6 and vSphere 5. A single Intellistack system can easily support over 1000 VDIs in a single rack.

Customers

www.tegile.com/resources/case-studies


Storage in the IntelliStack is provided by Tegile Intelligent Storage arrays which can be either fully flash-based or a hybrid flash solution. As an example, the Tegile T3800 full-flash array can support up to 336TB of capacity with 192GB of controller memory.

Security Features

Security is provided by the Cisco and VMware infrastructure of the system. A few vSphere security features include software acceptance levels to prevent unauthorized software installation, APIs that enable agentless monitoring, and host firewalls.


ESXi


The system is available in a wide range of models and blade servers that support up to 512 servers and up to 4PB of storage per blade-chassis. An overview of the models is available at www.vce.com/asset/documents/vblock-vxblock-product-overview.pdf


The VBlock systems support VM VSphere 6.0, and the VxBlock systems can support VMware NSX 6.2 and Cisco ACI. Each compute chassis can support up to 16 CIsco UCS server chassis per domain and up to 5 domains per chassis.

Customers

www.vce.com/customers/testimonials


The system can support drives sizes from 100Gb up to 3Tb. RAID 1, RAID5, RAID6, and RAID 10 stripping is supported. At the top end, the VxBlock 740 supports the EMC Symmetrix 40k which can support 88 –3200 drives of varying sizes.

Security Features

The VBlock architecture supports virtual firewalls, single-sign on services, data protection, security policy management, and others. Security features are provided by integrated components like the Cisco MDS 9000, EMC VMAX series products, Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch or VMware vSphere switch.


http://www.vce.com/converged-infrastructure

http://www.vce.com



http://www.tegile.com/solutions/intellistack

http://www.tegile.com

http://www.tegile.com/resources/case-studies

http://www.vce.com/asset/documents/vblock-vxblock-product-overview.pdf

http://www.vce.com/asset/documents/vblock-vxblock-product-overview.pdf

http://www.vce.com/customers/testimonials




Atlantis USX (Click for online version)

www.atlantiscomputing.com/solutions/hyper-converged

Description of Product: Atlantis USX is a software-defined storage solution that delivers the performance of an all-flash storage array at a lower cost vs. a traditional SAN or NAS. Atlantis USX enables local servers with RAM, SAS, Flash, or memory-channel storage to create a highly scalable, hyper converged platform using existing servers. This solution provides the flexibility to pool commodity local storage with RAM and/or flash across multiple server farms.

ATLANTIS CoMPUTING www.atlantiscomputing.com


ESXi, Xen, Atlantis USX is a software-defined storage solution and works with existing hypervisors running VMs.


Atlantis USX is primarily a storage management solution that creates an all-flash hyper converged solution. It is software that integrates with any x86 server platform, local flash storage, and 10GB Ethernet networking to create a hyper-converged platform.


Atlantis USX increases solution efficiency via HyperDup Content-Aware Data Services that leverage Atlantis real-time deduplication technology and effectively offloads IO before data traverses network or reaches storage.

Customers

www.atlantiscomputing.com/customers


Atlantis USX converged solutions support up to 300TB of effective storage capacity in a 3 server configuration.

Security Features

Because Atlantis USX moves applications to a centrally managed solution in the corporate datacenter, then there is less of a risk of a security breach or data loss.

Licensing/Pricing

Pricing is based on storage capacity, and the least expensive configuration is $2 per gigabyte.

DataGravity Discovery Series (Click for online version)

http://datagravity.com/products

Description of Product: DataGravity Discovery claims to be a “data-aware” storage platform. It allows the tracking of access and analyzing of data as it is stored. This can help you secure the data, intelligently retrieve it, reduce risk, and streamline data management.

DATA GRAVITy http://datagravity.com


It is a primary storage system. Any VM-aware system can use the Datagravity Discovery Series.


Not Applicable, this is a data storage system.


Not Applicable, this is a data storage system.

Licensing/Pricing

Based on capacity. http://datagravity.com/pricing

Customers

Centria, 451 Research, tek Partners


The Discovery series provides simple deployment, visibility into unstructured data, timely intelligence and analytics, no production impact or performance, enterprise class security and data awareness. Comes in 18TB, 36TB, 48TB, and 96TB configurations.

Security Features

Identify and protect against sensitive data loss, monitor unusual activity via alerts and audit trails, enable eDiscovery and governance workflows, anomaly and access detection, quickly recover from malicious activities, see full access history via search and more.



http://www.atlantiscomputing.com/solutions/hyper-converged

http://www.atlantiscomputing.com

http://www.atlantiscomputing.com/customers



http://datagravity.com/products

http://datagravity.com

http://datagravity.com/pricing




Gridstore All-Flash HyperConverged Appliance (Click for online version)

www.gridstore.com/products/gridstore-3/#hyperconverged-appliance

Description of Product: Gridstore’s award winning all-flash hyper converged Infrastructure offers leading price/performance, efficient scaling, and scale-to-fit design. The Gridstore HCI is easy and fast to deploy while reducing management time and effort. Leveraging its patented software, Gridstore HCI delivers 75% less physical infrastructure, 65% lower cost/VM and supports more VMs than traditional solutions.

GRIDSToRE, INC. www.gridstore.com


Hyper-V


A Gridstore all-flash HCA delivers the resources to run a data center. Each has 4 independent nodes with configurable cores, RAM, NICs and flash storage (select from configurations tailored to workloads). Erasure encoding and all-flash technology result in 50% lower TCO and delivers QoS per VM.


With compute, SAN, and storage housed in a single 2U appliance, Gridstore all-flash HCI removes network cabling issues forever. As a complete data center-in-a-box, IT managers can deploy a Gridstore HCA in a remote location and not worry about connectivity issues.

Customers

www.gridstore.com/customers


Gridstore HCI starts can grow from three nodes supporting 92TB of affordable all-flash storage in a 2U enclosure to 256 nodes supporting 6PB of all-flash storage. Patented software and all-flash technology deliver the fastest performance for the lowest TCO for all critical Windows workloads.

Security Features

Gridstore offers a fault tolerant, complete cloud-in-a-box solution that improves security. Deploying VDI with Gridstore improves end user satisfaction and protects critical data. A partnership with 5nine Software, running cloud security on a HCA ensures the highest level of network & data security.

Nexenta OpenSDx (Click for online version)

https://nexenta.com/products

Description of Product: Nexenta OpenSDS (Open Source based Software-Defined Storage) solutions are pure software based storage solutions running on vendor agnostic hardware providing customers freedom and preventing vendor lock-in.

NExENTA https://nexenta.com


ESXi, Xen


Not Applicable


Not Applicable

Licensing/Pricing

https://nexenta.com/how-buy

Customers

WiPro, GoDaddy, PaloAlto Networks, NASA, and more.


Nexenta delivers unified file storage such as NFS and SMB and block storage such as Fibre Channel and iSCSI on industry standard hardware. It scales from TeraBytes to PetaBye configurations. All management functionality is included by default. Nexenta also delivers scaling to OpenStack clouds.

Security Features

Security is handled at the OS level with features such as IPtables ipfilter, etc. in Linux.



http://www.gridstore.com/products/gridstore-3/#hyperconverged-appliance

http://www.gridstore.com

http://www.gridstore.com/customers



https://nexenta.com/products

https://nexenta.com

https://nexenta.com/how-buy




SmartStack (Click for online version)

www.nimblestorage.com/solutions/smartstack

Description of Product: SmartStack is an integrated infrastructure solution jointly developed by Cisco and Nimble Storage that integrates compute, network, and storage resources. SmartStack solutions are built upon Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) and reference architectures.

NIMBLE SToRAGE www.nimblestorage.com


ESXi, Hyper-V


Nimble Storage’s SmartStack reference architecture is built on Cisco UCS servers. Cisco’s data center platform that integrates industry-standard, x86-architecture Intel processor–based servers with networking and storage access into a single unified system.


Nimble Storage’s SmartStack reference architecture is built on Cisco UCS platform integrating Cisco Nexus switches, and Cisco UCS Manager. Cisco fabric extender technology reduces the number of network layers by directly connecting physical and virtual servers to the system’s fabric interconnects.

Customers

www.nimblestorage.com/case-studies


Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash Platform combines the speed of flash storage with the cost-effective capacity of a hard disk. Additionally, Nimble Storage InfoSight is an analytics and storage management engine that is designed to keep Nimble Storage arrays running in peak conditions.

Security Features

SmartStack is built on industry-certified and integrated infrastructure and bare-metal solutions. This allows administrators to build virtual and cloud infrastructures while maintaining the same level of security and policy across all environments.

Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform (Click for online version)

http://go.nutanix.com/rs/nutanix/images/Datasheet_official.pdf

Description of Product: The Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform is a software-driven infrastructure solution that converges storage, compute, and virtualization into a turnkey appliance that can be deployed in minutes. Data center capacity can be expanded one node at a time without disruption, delivering predictable scalability and flexibility.

NUTANIx www.nutanix.com


ESXi, KVM, Hyper-V, Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor


Nutanix Acropolis is a powerful scale-out data fabric for storage, compute, and virtualization. Acropolis combines software-defined storage with built-in virtualization in a turnkey hyper-converged infrastructure solution that can run any application at any scale.


Nutanix Acropolis builds on the core capabilities of Nutanix HCI to incorporate an open platform for virtualization and application mobility. A built-in hypervisor and powerful open runtime environment together deliver invisible virtualization capabilities for a post-SAN world.

Customers

www.nutanix.com/customers


The Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform delivers enterprise data storage as an on-demand service by employing a distributed software architecture. Nutanix eliminates the need for traditional SAN and NAS solutions, and delivers a rich set of software-defined services that are entirely VM-centric.

Security Features

Nutanix combines two-factor authentication and data-at-rest encryption with a security development lifecycle that is integrated into product development to help customers meet the most stringent security requirements.



http://www.nimblestorage.com/solutions/smartstack

http://www.nimblestorage.com

http://www.nimblestorage.com/case-studies



http://go.nutanix.com/rs/nutanix/images/Datasheet_Official.pdf

http://www.nutanix.com

http://www.nutanix.com/customers




vSTAC OS and GHCI Servers (Click for online version)

http://pivot3.com/vstac-os-software

Description of Product: Pivot3’s global hyper converged infrastructure solution based on the vSTAC OS combines clusters of hardware into a single virtualized share storage, compute and more into one single pane of glass on COTS based hardware. This eliminates the need for separate physical storage are networks and servers.

PIVoT3 http://pivot3.com


ESXi


vSTAC OS is used on Intel COTS based hardware server configurations from standalone rack servers to blade server configurations via partners. Stacks of 3 to 16 appliances can exist in one cluster, or “hyperconverged protection group.” Scale is achieved with multiple protection groups.


Aggregate up to 16 storage controller configurations or 12 servers for compute.

Customers

Not Provided


Scale to 864 TB in a protection group. Pivot3 pools disk storage across appliances to form a Virtual SAN. Dynamic Storage Management includes dynamic logical and physical capacity expansion, load balancing, iSCSI multi-path.

Security Features

State-sensitive LEDs, remote management via vSTAC Manager, SNMP MIB support and remote notifications via “Phone Home” functionality.

HC3 (Click for online version)

www.scalecomputing.com/products/product-overview

Description of Product: Scale Computing’s HC3 virtualization platform is a complete ‘data center in a box’ with server, storage, and virtualization integrated into a single appliance. With no virtualization software to license and no external storage to buy, HC3 products lower out-of-pocket costs and simplify the infrastructure needed to keep your applications running.

SCALE CoMPUTING www.scalecomputing.com


KVM, Hyper-V, The HC3 includes Scale Computing’s own open-source-based hypervisor.


The HC3 is available in 3 models: HC1000, HC2000, and HC4100. At the top end, each 1-RU HC4100 can support 12xCPU cores, 24xCPU threads, and 128GB of RAM. The chassis can be combined into an 8-node cluster that multiplies the capacities.


The HC3 supports VM OS’s from Windows, Centos, Redhat, Linux, Oracle, and Fedora. Each cluster is tested to a maxiumum virtual disk size of 8TB, 26 virtual disks per VM, and 8 NICs per VM.

Customers

Testimonials from current clients including KIB Electronics, Sevier County Bank, Auburn University, GEO Foundation, and Fidelity State Bank and Trust can be found at www.scalecomputing.com/resources/customer-case-studies


HC3 stripes and mirrors data across all of the drives in the cluster in what is effectively a network RAID 10 such that there is no single point of failure. At the top end, the HC4100 can support up to 14.4TB of data per chassis.

Security Features

The HC3 is an entry-level system and provides no additional security feature beyond what are provided by the OS’s of the installed VM’s



http://pivot3.com/vstac-os-software

http://pivot3.com



https://www.scalecomputing.com/products/product-overview

https://www.scalecomputing.com

https://www.scalecomputing.com/resources/customer-case-studies

https://www.scalecomputing.com/resources/customer-case-studies




SGI Servers, Storage, and Software (Click for online version)

www.sgi.com/products

Description of Product: SGI specializes in high performance computing data center environments using open systems and industry standard components.

SILICoN GRAPHICS INTERNATIoNAL CoRP.

www.sgi.com




SGI Rackable Servers range from four to eighteen core Intel Xeon Processors and unto 1.5TB RAM per node. SGI UV series servers for Super Computer power based on Intel Xeon designs (up to 256 sockets). SGI ICE X series “scale-out” platform for super computer applications (up to 191 teraflops per rack).


SGI servers use Infiniband technologies to create high speed cross connects for high speed clusters.

Customers

www.sgi.com/company_info/resources/case_studies.html


SGI offers the InfiniteStorage series of products that range from 240TB of raw capacity to systems of ups to 384 drives. Additional models and options optimize for speed as well as capacity and redundancy/resiliency.

Security Features

Not Applicable

Licensing/Pricing

www.sgi.com/sales/askarep.html

OmniStack Data Virtualization Platform 3.0 (Click for online version)

www.simplivity.com/products/omnistack-3-0

Description of Product: SimpliVity’s hyper-converged infrastructure provides powerful capabilities for multi- and single-site deployments, advanced data protection, and data efficiency features. It delivers enterprise-grade scalability, performance, protection, and resiliency, with the cloud economics that businesses demand, resulting in 3x TCO reduction.

SIMPLIVITy www.simplivity.com


KVM. At this time, SimpliVity supports KVM and VMware vSphere/ESXi, with Microsoft Hyper-V in development.


With SimpliVity’s scale-out architecture, an IT infrastructure can grow as a company does, allowing for easy proof of concept and test/dev environments, and enabling the ability for a company to start small and scale as needed, in single-node or compute-only increments.


SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure utilizes existing hypervisor technologies, leading network virtualization technologies, and SimpliVity’s data virtualization technology, so companies can realize the full benefits of virtualizing their entire data center, particularly workload mobility.

Customers

www.simplivity.com/resources/customer-testimonials


SimpliVity’s solution provides a building-block approach to scaling storage that utilizes accelerated inline deduplication, compression, and optimization throughout the entire lifecycle of the data. SimpliVity reduces the amount of I/O, thus delivering the optimal performance with less hardware.

Security Features

SimpliVity assimilates 8-12 appliances into a single solution that eliminates IT sprawl and complexity, which reduces information security vulnerabilities. SimpliVity also has solutions with Vormetric and HyTrust to protect data and VMs through encryption, while delivering superior performance.



http://www.sgi.com/products

http://www.sgi.com

http://www.sgi.com/company_info/resources/case_studies.html

http://www.sgi.com/company_info/resources/case_studies.html

http://www.sgi.com/sales/askarep.html



https://www.simplivity.com/products/omnistack-3-0

https://www.simplivity.com

https://www.simplivity.com/resources/customer-testimonials




SkySecure (Click for online version)

www.skyportsystems.net/overview

Description of Product: Skyport provides secure enclaves for the applications you care about most. Skyport has rearchitected the x86 hardware and software stack into a turnkey, trusted system with embedded security. Your data stays on your premises, while Skyport’s cloud-based management verifies and documents continuous enforcement.

SkyPoRT SySTEMS www.skyportsystems.net


SkySecure is a converged compute, virtualization, and security stack platform. It has an embedded hypervisor, currently based on Xen.


Each SkySecure System has: 2x 8-core Intel Xeon processor E5, 128 GB ECC DRAM, 2x 960GB SATA SSD, 28 vCPUs, shared between VMs and security compartments. A SkySecure I/O controller assures security is always on in a separate subsystem. The chassis is tamper-resistant and exposes zero-ports.


SkySecure dynamically configures a private DMZ network to establish a secure enclave for each VM using SDN technologies. This secured network environment provides either layer 2 or layer 3 connectivity and also incorporates extensive network security controls and anti-spoofing protections.

Customers

www.skyportsystems.net/partners


SkySecure systems have 2x 960GB SATA SSDs in the chassis for hardware encrypted storage, and features support for mounting external shared file systems, such as with NFS. The system also includes builtin backup management facilities that are secured and audited.

Security Features

SkySecure builds-in: Per-VM DMZ and firewall to stop surveillance, attacks, and data exfiltration; Integrity verification to provide confidence no malware, viruses, or rootkits are installed; A security I/O coprocessor assures security is on and cannot be bypassed; Lifetime storage of evidence.

EVO:RAIL (Click for online version)

www.supermicro.com/solutions/EVo_RAIL.cfm

Description of Product: Super Micro (Supermicro) produces a complete hyper converged Infrastructure appliance based on VMware’s EVO:RAIL architecture. It combines compute, networking and storage resources into a single 2U, 4-node form factor to create a simple, easy-to-deploy building block for the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC).

SUPER MICRo CoMPUTER INC. www.supermicro.com


ESXi


The SuperMicro EVO:RAIL solution is available with either the SYS-2028TP-VRL Series with 2x Intel E5-2630v3 (8 cores per CPU) or the SYS-2028TP-VRLX Series with 2x Intel E5-2670v3 (12 cores per CPU).


The EVO:RAIL runs VMware Sphere, vCenter Server, and VMware Virtual SAN software and provides for up to 200 virtual machines per 2RU chassis.

Customers

No public references are listed for Supemicro’s EVO:RAIL


The SYS-2028TP-VRL Series supports 1x 400GB SSD for cache, 3x 1.2TB HDD for 3.6TB capacity per chassis, and the SYS-2028TP-VRLX Series supports 1x 800GB SSD for cache, 5x 1.2TB HDD for 6TB capacity.

Security Features

The Supermicro EVO:RAIL supports all the integrated security features that are built into VMware’s vSphere and vServer software.



https://www.skyportsystems.net/overview

http://www.skyportsystems.net

https://www.skyportsystems.net/partners



http://www.supermicro.com/solutions/EVO_RAIL.cfm

http://www.supermicro.com




Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2800 (Click for online version)

www.teradata.com/products-and-services/Data-Appliance

Description of Product: The Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance is a fully-integrated system purpose-built for data warehousing. The appliance features the industry leading Teradata Database, a Teradata platform with dual Intel Xeon fourteen-core processors, SUSE linux operating system, and enterprise class storage all preinstalled into a power-efficient unit.

TERADATA www.teradata.com


No hypervisor is present in the Teradata Data Warehouse appliance


The Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance features Dual Intel Xeon processors E5-2697 v3, each with 14 cores running at 2.6GHz. Its linux software-based, shared-nothing architecture delivers always-on parallelism so even the toughest, most complex queries complete quickly.


The only virtualization in the appliance is for management. It features a single, 1U server for database, hardware, and infrastructure management. Teradata Viewpoint, Teradata Service Workstation, and cabinet management interface controller provide a single operational view for managing the system.

Customers

3M, 7-11, Air Canada, Ace Hardware, Applebees


Each node has up to 512GB of memory, with up to 12 nodes per cabinet. With compression enabled, the system is scalable to more than 54 petabytes with 1200GB drives.

Security Features

The appliance has several security features including: user authentication (through single sign-on, trusted sessions, and LDAP), IP filters, user authorization, security roles, network encryption, disk encryption, and data encryption.

EVO:RAIL (Click for online version)

www.vmware.com/products/evorail

Description of Product: EVO:RAIL combines VMware compute, network, storage, and management resources into a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance to create a simple, easy-to-manage, all-in-one solution for all your virtualized workloads, including tier-1 production and mission-critical applications. Offered by selected partners, EVO:RAIL is backed by a single point of contact for software and hardware support.

VMWARE www.vmware.com


ESXi


EVO:RAIL is certified to work on a variety of partner hardware including Fujitsu, Hitachi, Dell, EMC, Supermicro, and others. The compute features will vary depending on the hardware selected, but it can support up to 8 x Intel E5 Processors, Ivy Bridge or Haswell (48, 64, 80, 96 or 144 cores).


Each 2U appliance can support up to 4 nodes and 800 VMs. A cluster can be configured with up to 16 appliances and 12,800 VMs per cluster.

Customers

www.vmware.com/a/customers/product/71/EVO:RAIL


Depending upon the particular partner hardware chosen, the EVO:RAIL can support up to 16 or 27.2 TB Hybrid Storage (HDD/SSD). It includes VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced (VDPA) for backup protection and vSphere Replication, for replication. Many 3rd-party backup soluitons are also available.

Security Features

EVO:RAIL offers high-availability and built-in security policies. It also is fully compatible with the entire VMware portfolio such as vSphere Replication, VMware vRealize Suite, VMware NSX , VMware Horizon and vCloud Air, and all the security features they support.



http://www.teradata.com/products-and-services/Data-Appliance

http://www.teradata.com


http://www.vmware.com/products/evorail

https://www.vmware.com

http://www.vmware.com/a/customers/product/71/EVO:RAIL




Arkin Visibility Platform and Cloud Service (Click for online version)

www.arkin.net/converged-infrastructure-visibility

Description of Product: The Arkin Visibility Platform and Cloud Service provides IT managers peerless visibility, contextual analytics, and a collaboration platform for converged systems. The platform provides simplicity and consumer class collaboration. The Arkin solutions supports technologies such as VMware NSX, Cisco UCS, VCE Vblocks, Palo Alto Networks firewalls, and others. The platform can be deployed on-premise or consumed as a service in the Arkin cloud (SaaS).

ARkIN www.arkin.net


The Arkin Platform and Cloud Service is an operations and visualization platform.


N/A as the Arkin Platform is a visualization and collaboration platform supporting the new converged and hyperconverged data center technologies.


The Arkin platform provides a 360 degree view of workloads including layer 3 connectivity through logical and physical components such as routers, switches, L2 networks and firewalls. The platform also supports ECMP, VRRP, HSRP, GLBP and routing protocols like OSPF, and BGP.

Customers

Arkin does not provide a list of customers.



Security Features


Cumulus Networks DVC Converged Infrastructure (Click for online version)

https://cumulusnetworks.com/solutions/converged-infrastructures

Description of Product: Dell, VMware, and Cumulus Networks are partnering to deliver a converged infrastructure solution that consists of VMware NSX with Cumulus Linux on Dell Open Networking switches. The solution is available from Dell. Cumulus Linux is a Linux-based network operating system that runs on top of industry standard networking hardware.

CUMULUS NETWoRkS https://cumulusnetworks.com


ESXi, KVM


This multivendor solution utilizes the Dell PowerEdge blade servers and M1000e blade enclosures for the compute components.


Dell provides the S4810-ON and S6000-ON switches for a scalable layer 3 underlay fabric and the S6000-ON for L2 gateway functions. Cumulus Linux provides zero-touch network installation using ONIE, VXLAN support, L2 gateway services, and integration with VMware NSX.

Customers

https://cumulusnetworks.com/cumulus-linux/customers


The Cumulus DVC solution supports Dells’ rapid access to SAN-based media sources with ‘fluid cache’ for SAN in-server storage-caching technology, redundant embedded hypervisors, fault-resilient memory and multiple RAID options.

Security Features

VMware NSX provides essential isolation, security and the desired segmentation of network traffic where communication is controlled through a policy. Security is shrink-wrapped around each workload wherein faults & threats are contained with micro-granularity.



http://www.arkin.net/converged-infrastructure-visibility

http://www.arkin.net



https://cumulusnetworks.com/solutions/converged-infrastructures

https://cumulusnetworks.com

https://cumulusnetworks.com/cumulus-linux/customers




PicOS (Click for online version)

www.pica8.com/products/picos

Description of Product: PicOS eliminates vendor lock-in by delivering open, hardware-agnostic networking. Built on Linux, PicOS incorporates a full Layer-2 and Layer-3 feature set with support for OpenFlow, OVSDB, and other key SDN protocols such as VXLAN. PicOS enables customers to deliver differentiated network applications and services on white box switches.

PICA8, INC. www.pica8.com




Pica8 sees white box switching hardware moving to x86 type CPUs to enable tool sharing between the server and network sides of the data center.


PicOS has integration with OpenStack using a Neutron plugin (https://github.com/Pica8) and with ODL. PicOS has also been integrated with VMware’s NSX, Midokura and CPLANE using OVSDB.

Customers

Factual, TOU-IX, Baidu, Yahoo! Japan


Not Applicable

Security Features

PicOS supports expected switching security features including SSH/SSL/TLS, TACACS+, AAA / Radius, L2/L3/L4 ACLs, DoS protection, multi-level user authentication and more.

Licensing/Pricing

www.pica8.com/products/picos



http://www.pica8.com/products/picos

http://www.pica8.com

https://github.com/Pica8

http://www.pica8.com/products/picos

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The Trusted News and Resource Site for SDx, SDN, NFV, Cloud and Virtualization Infrastructure

Rev A

http://www.sdxcentral.com

Documents

The Future of the Converged Data Centerdocshare01.docshare.tips/files/31644/316449631.pdf · Hitachi Data Systems ... The Future of the Converged Data Center ... the converged infrastructure