Rating 10 top hyperconverged infrastructure products
As enterprises look to reduce data center complexity, many are considering hyperconverged infrastructure platforms. But with major vendors such as Cisco, HPE, VMware and Dell offering products, how do you decide where to invest?
As enterprises look to reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO), many are considering hyperconverged platforms to consolidate their data centers by combining storage, computing and networking into a single system.
A hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) includes a hypervisor for virtualized computing, software-defined storage and virtualized networking, and typically runs on commodity servers, which can be clustered together to create pools of shared compute and storage resources.
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With big names dominating the HCI market, how do you decide on a vendor and what makes one platform better than another? A good HCI solution can save your company money by simplifying deployment, streamlining operations, decreasing TCO and reducing your data center footprint. However, when implementing a platform, it’s important to take into consideration the potentially significant setup and operational costs.
[ Related: Inside Hyperconvergence: Combining compute, storage and networking ]
To avoid purchasing the wrong HCI offering and incurring unnecessary costs, what are the important aspects to consider when evaluating different hyper-converged solutions?
What differentiates enterprise hyper-converged solutions?
Evaluation is key in the purchasing process: Determining your requirements and what products best meet them. Equally important is learning what real users in the market are saying.
For example, a senior vice president and CIO at a hospitality company with 10,000+ employees wrote:
The most important criteria to look for when evaluating solutions are these:
- Reliability and product reputation
- Simplicity, scalable and fit for purpose
- Ability to setup a node for remote failover
- Flexibility and supportability
- Ease of Migration and Implementation
- Greatest chance to achieve established success criteria
Other users agree that these are some of the key areas that separate the top vendors in HCI. It is important to determine your company’s requirements for HCI, then use those requirements as a reference to determine which solution is best for your needs.
Keeping hyper-converged decisions real
IT Central Station’s Hyper-Converged (HCI) for Business Buyer’s Guide and Reviews report identifies 30 enterprise-level hyper-converged vendors, many of whom offer multiple solutions. IT Central Station, a partner of Insider Pro, collects user reviews from a community of enterprise technology professionals. You'll find comparisons based on pricing, performance, features, stability and more.
Listed in alphabetical order, here are the Top 10 HCI vendors identified by IT professionals:
Download the PDF report to see how technology professionals ranked the top hyper-converged solutions.