Best Hyperconverged Infrastructure Appliances – DCIG

Here is a summary of the report, DCIG 2017-18 Hyperconverged Infrastructure Appliance Buyer’s Guide by Charley McMaster, senior research analyst, and Ken Clipperton, managing analyst, DCIG, LLC.

Overall rankings

* The licensing provider is listed at the beginning of each ranking category in which its products are included. One should not draw any negative inferences about any other products included in that ranking.
** OmniStack utilizes Cisco UCS, Dell EMC PowerEdge, HPE, Huawei, or Lenovo servers

Products earning the Recommended ranking include the Pivot3 Acuity X-Series, Dell EMC VxRail Series, Dell EMC XC6320-6, HPE SimpliVity OmniCube CN-5400, CN-3400 and CN-2400, Nutanix NX-8000, NX-6000, NX-3000 and NX-1000 Series.

These products are generally distinguished from products ranked Excellent by the following characteristics:

• 70% of the Recommended products scale to at least 64 nodes in a cluster compared to 46% of products ranked Excellent
• Average 25TB/RU (terabyte per rack unit) of raw all-flash capacity, more than 2.5X the average of Excellent products

Pivot3’s Acuity X-Series enables enterprise workload consolidation by integrating NVMe flash and rich QoS technology from its 2016 acquisition of NexGen. Acuity scales to 12 hybrid or 16 all-flash nodes-and up to 516.8 TB of raw all-flash capacity-per virtual Performance Group (vPG). Pivot3 supports unlimited vPGs per cluster.

Pivot3’s patented Scalar Erasure Coding technology utilizes storage capacity much more efficiently than traditional RAID and replication technologies, delivering storage efficiency of up to 94%. Optional vGPU cards enhance VDI performance and consolidation ratios.

The Dell EMC VxRail Series consists of five different platforms designed to address different use cases. The VxRail products utilize VMware virtualization technologies including Virtual SAN. Four of the five platforms are available as hybrid or all-flash configurations. The largest all-flash platform scales to 2.9PB in a 64 node maximum scale-out configuration. Each 1U or 2U appliance contains one or four nodes. The VxRail Series offers erasure coding, deduplication and compression data services on the all-flash configurations. With VSAN 6.2, the product now provides stretch clustering, allowing nodes to be in separate physical locations.

The Dell EMC XC6320-6 is 2U, four-node appliance powered by Nutanix software. Dell EMC positions the XC6320 for high-density compute and storage environments, service providers and private cloud deployments. Each all-flash node consists dual Xeon processors and 6 x 3.8TB SSD drives giving the appliance a maximum raw all-flash capacity of 91.2TB. The Dell EMC XC6320-6 offers REST API for automated management and supports multiple hypervisors including Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), VMware ESXi and Hyper-V.

The Dell EMC XC6320-6 is 2U, four-node appliance powered by Nutanix software. Dell EMC positions the XC6320 for high-density compute and storage environments, service providers and private cloud deployments. Each all-flash node consists dual Xeon processors and 6 x 3.8TB SSD drives giving the appliance a maximum raw all-flash capacity of 91.2 TB. The Dell EMC XC6320-6 offers REST API for automated management and supports multiple hypervisors including Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), VMware ESXi and Hyper-V.

Simplivity was acquired by HPE in February 2017. The HPE SimpliVity OmniCube CN-5400, CN-3400 and CN-2400 have a maximum raw storage capacity of 25.6TB, 21.6TB and 10.4TB per hybrid appliance, and 22.4TB, 10.6TB and 8TB in all-flash configurations. The OmniCube scales to eight appliances for a maximum all-flash capacity of 179.2TB. The latest OmniStack software release builds on existing data protection capabilities by adding support for multi-node stretch clustering and SQL Server application-aware backups. SimpliVity appliances utilize OmniStack Accelerator Cards to offload and accelerate deduplication and compression operations.

The Nutanix NX-8000, NX-6000, NX-3000, and NX-1000 models all earned the Recommended ranking in this year’s Buyer’s Guide. Nutanix claims unlimited scaling. A 64-node NX-8000 cluster provides almost 3PB of raw all-flash capacity. Nutanix products support multiple hypervisors including VMware ESXi, Hyper-V and its own KVM-based Acropolis hypervisor. The latest release of the Nutanix AOS now includes native file services through AFS (Acropolis File Services), the Prism self-service portal and ESXi management within Prism.

Excellent Ranking
The 14 products that achieved an Excellent ranking are Pivot3 HCI Blades, All-Flash and Hybrid products, Dell EMC XC730 Series and XC630-10, HPE Hyper Converged 380 VMware Platform System Standard, 250 for Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard and 250 for VMware Platform System Standard, HPE SimpliVity CN-1400 and OmniStack, Lenovo HX7510, HX5510, HX3000 Series and HX2710-E.

These products generally share the following characteristics, with a some exceptions:

• Support more than one hypervisor
• Support a direct connection for cloud migrations
• Support stretch clustering

Pivot3 HCI Blades, HCI All-Flash and HCI Hybrid models have similar management and operational characteristics as the Recommended Acuity X-Series with the exception of NVMe flash and QoS support. The HCI Blade chassis utilizes 16 half-width blades for a compute-dense HCI solution supporting up to 51.2TB of raw all-flash capacity. The HCI Flash scales to nearly 500TB, while the HCI Hybrid scales to over 1.5 PB of raw capacity.

The Dell EMC XC730 Series and XC630-10 share many similarities with their XC6320-6 sibling. These appliances fill a spectrum of use-cases including VDI, storage-heavy workloads and performance-intensive transactional workloads. The Dell EMC XC systems run Nutanix software and provide broad hypervisor support including VMware ESXi, Hyper-V and Acropolis. These products offer all-flash or hybrid configurations, the largest providing 60TB raw capacity per node.

HPE Hyper Converged 380 and 250 products are available in hybrid and all flash configurations. The HC380 is available in three workload configurations: Virtualization, CloudSystem and VDI. A GPU card can be added to enhance VDI performance. It supports up to 40.2TB of usable all-flash capacity per node. The HC380 scales to 16 nodes. The HC250 supports 32 nodes with VMware ESXi and 16 nodes with Hyper-V. HPE HC250 provides VM and application consistent snapshots and synchronous replication for multi-site HA. It provides 9.6TB of raw all-flash capacity per node, or 38.4TB in a 4-node appliance.

HPE SimpliVity OmniCube CN-1400 is the entry level model of the series. Like its larger OmniCube siblings, the CN-1400 is powered by the OmniStack operating software. The CN-1400 is available in a hybrid configuration with an effective capacity of 6TB per node.

HPE SimpliVity OmniCube CN-1400 is the entry level model of the series. Like its larger OmniCube siblings, the CN-1400 is powered by the OmniStack operating software. The CN-1400 is available in a hybrid configuration with an effective capacity of 6TB per node.

The HPE SimpliVity OmniStack OS is packaged with several OEM hardware vendors including HPE, Cisco, Dell EMC and Lenovo. This option benefits organizations wanting to minimize vendor lock-in or that have a preferred server vendor, or where getting a new vendor approved by the purchasing department would add many months to the acquisition process. The OmniStack OS provides an enhanced optimization engine identifying VM locations for workload balancing, and stretched clustering that enables deployments to span multiple locations.

Lenovo HX7510, HX5510, HX3000 Series and HX2710-E utilize Lenovo hardware and the Nutanix OS. The HX7510 is a 2U, single-node appliance positioned for high-performance enterprise databases and applications. A 64-node cluster scales to nearly 3PB of raw storage capacity. The Lenovo HX Series supports Hyper-V, VMware ESXi, and the built-in Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor. Existing Lenovo customers can leverage XClarity, Lenovo’s hardware systems management application.