by Nick Cross, EMEA Senior Director HCI, VMware
Any business that develops a solution, whether it’s a tangible product or a new service, knows there’s really only one measure of success – and that’s what the customer thinks of it.
We’ve spent over twenty years innovating and developing solutions that deliver what our customers need, from virtualized servers right through to hybrid clouds. It’s worked too – VMware’s continued growth is testament to our ability to develop what enterprises need as they navigate a path through their own individual digital transformations.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) space. Across the industry, HCI is transforming how customers deploy IT infrastructure. “The converged systems market continues to grow despite a challenging overall datacenter infrastructure environment,” said Sebastian Lagana, research manager, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies at IDC. “In particular, hyperconverged solutions remain in demand as vendors do an excellent job positioning the solutions as an ideal framework for hybrid, multi-cloud environments due to their software-defined nature and ease of integration into premises-agnostic environments.”
VMware Hyperconverged Infrastructure
On VMware’s part, we’ve taken HCI from being merely integrated storage and compute right up to a full software stack with software-defined networking and advanced management, available across hybrid clouds, thanks to VMware Cloud Foundation.
It’s an approach that’s really resonating strongly with enterprises. In 2019, we topped 20,000 customers adopting VMware vSAN to power their HCI implementations, giving us a 38% share of the HCI software market. That works out at 50% of the Global 2000 using vSAN significantly simplifying the management and operations of their compute and storage by consolidating long-established silos. They’re using vSAN to power their most critical applications, unlocking their ability to deploy those apps at the speed their business requires.
Dramatic Impact on Business
It’s why the likes of Nigel Barry, service delivery manager at UK housing association Accent Group, described vSAN as,“blowing all the other solutions out of the water. It ticked all the boxes and more. It was the ease of use, the resilience and redundancy of the system, plus the ease with which we could upgrade, change and patch, which we’ve now done several times in-house.”
One of the biggest names in online betting and gaming globally, William Hill, has also seen how moving to VMware HCI can have a dramatic impact on its business. “From the CIO and CEO down, the main driver for the business is speed of delivery,” Ben Fairclough, infrastructure architect at William Hill, says. “Our previous, monolithic infrastructure hindered us from getting to the next level. HCI takes us there.”
He goes on to say that “now we have a completely Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), we can scale the service in a cost-efficient manner, as the business demands.”
Furthermore, a September 2019 VMware-commissioned Forrester Consulting study, The Total Economic Impact™ Of VMware vSAN, found “vSAN offered a simplified, secure storage solution at a lower cost than traditional storage with the flexibility to scale and address dynamic business needs.”
The report goes on to reveal that a composite organization, such as those interviewed for the study, could see a return on investment of 259%.
VMware vSAN Wins Product of the Year from CRN
It’s not just our customers that see the benefits either – our partners fully support VMware’s HCI strategy. This was demonstrated when recently, vSAN was recently named ‘CRN Product of the Year’ in the Software Defined Storage category for the fourth year in a row. It’s a fantastic result, as it’s our partners responding and signifying how they and their customers feel.
With VMware HCI, those enterprises can modernize at their own pace. They can evolve from existing virtualization investments to Core and Full Stack HCI, all powered by vSAN, using a consistent infrastructure both on-premises and in the cloud, leveraging the same tools and a consistent operating model on their journey.
In doing so, they can emulate the likes of William Hill, benefiting from increased IT agility and, ultimately, meeting their business requirements more consistently.
We believe VMware HCI, through vSAN and Cloud Foundation, gives you the best options for realizing value today while futureproofing you for tomorrow. To find out more, take a look at some of the resources here:
- Read our eBook: 3 Reasons to Consolidate on HCI
- Attend our upcoming webcasts to hear the latest technology insights for VMware HCI:
- VMware vSAN: Performance Best Practices, 23 January
- VMware vSAN: Networking Design Considerations, 6 February
- VMware vSAN Performance Troubleshooting, 27 February
