Transcript
Dave Littman: So Todd, you know, we often think of hyperconverged infrastructure as an appliance and as DCIG's lead researcher into HCI, talk to us a little bit about HCI software, how you guys define it and you know your research into it. Todd Dorsey: Well, the term "hyperconverged infrastructure; HCI" has been around for well over a decade. I think there's some debate upon who first coined the term, but traditionally it's was brought into place to help solve the problems of data center infrastructure management and managing the three pillars of compute and storage and networking independently and separately, which of course introduces its own problems of complexity and cost and scalability and deployment. So we've had these appliances out for well over a decade. But over the years we've seen products introduced to market that are software-only. That is, they have been decoupled from the appliance themselves. And these software solutions allow companies to manage converged appliances with compute and storage and networking included. So generally the the software pieces have those pieces in place: hypervisor, storage and network. In some cases, we see HCI software perhaps may not have a networking piece in place because those components are already covered or it may not be as relevant to the use case. But generally speaking, HCI software can be deployed on commodity hardware or it's available to be deployed on a select list of OEM server vendors. But the main point with HCI software, it's it's decoupled from a specific vendor appliance. It's not limited to a single vendor, and customers have some choice over deploying their HCI software. Dave Littman: Okay. Sounds like there's some flexibility there. Go ahead, Bruce. Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, if I can jump in here, I would say another thought process would be, um, back in the early days of HCI, appliances were needed, probably because it wasn't so easy for an IT team to build it themselves. It had to be a closed environment. It had to be okay, these specific servers, this software, this version of the hypervisor, right. So it had to be a bundled, tested solution that they knew they can just plug in and work. Well, if I'm if I'm allowed to give a little bit of a StorMagic plug here, I think I am, which which is that, you know, we're kind of unique in the industry is that we don't require well, A) we don't require an appliance. That's why we're in this report as HCI software, obviously. But our software is designed to be super flexible so that our customers can use any server they want, as long as it's an x86 variant, any server they want. They can mix and match between any vendor, any model, any disk drive configuration, any memory. Um, so it just adds the ultra flexibility for our customers. The real world use case for this is there is a big movement in the industry. There are a lot of enterprises out there, organizations that have single server deployments at their edge sites because they just couldn't afford HA, high availability. Now what they can do is, they can procure a second server that doesn't have to be identical. They can load a hypervisor of their choice and StorMagic SvSAN and we don't care, as long as the two servers can run the same version of the hypervisor. That's our lowest common denominator. We'll do all the HCI storage, virtualization and high availability so that that's the way our software works. We are, you know, like I said, we work on any server. Our strongest partnership is with HPE. We have a global OEM agreement with them and they make it even easier for customers. So now any channel partner of HPE's around the world sells a complete solution. It's not an appliance per se, but the channel partner, integrator or HPE, take two HPE servers, our software, any hypervisor, and away they go. They have a bundled HCI solution that they can deliver to their end user customers.
