The latest market data from IDC continues to show that VMware vSAN is leading the HCI market. IDCs Q1 2018 Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, released on June 26th, 2018, shows that the total value of hyperconverged solutions running VMware vSAN accounted for 37.2% of the Q1 2018 HCI market, making HCI systems powered by vSAN the largest portion of the hyperconverged systems market.
In addition to the IDC data, in our most recent earnings call, we announced that vSAN now has over 14,000 customers, demonstrating strong demand for accelerating digital transformation initiatives with HCI.
Each of the milestones we cross further fuels the vSAN product team to deliver additional innovations and continue to enhance the experience for our next 14,000 customers. We remain committed to enhancing the industry’s most complete digital foundation that starts with the power and simplicity of HCI.
IDC Data Shows vSAN is the #1 HCI Software
Let’s dig into the data. In the most recent quarter, Q1 2018, VMware vSAN led the market in share based on systems running HCI software, with $456.3M in revenue, up from $217.8 in Q4 2016, an astounding 109.5% growth. During the quarter, the overall market grew at an impressive 76.3% rate, but vSAN blew past that—growing more than 40% faster than the market.
Through that growth, vSAN captured additional market share. vSAN continues to lead the HCI market with 37.2% share. This market share is composed of vSAN sold on ReadyNode servers, jointly certified servers by VMware ReadyLabs and the OEM server partner, and Dell EMC VxRail, a jointly-engineered, turnkey HCI appliance.
The market continues to validate VMware’s belief that software-based HCI will best address customer needs, now and in the future.
VMware’s Unique Software-Based HCI Delivers Key Benefits
We’ve enjoyed watching the industry as a whole confirm the importance of a software-first business model, an idea VMware has held from the start. VMware, having always been software based, is taking advantage of our software DNA and firing on all cylinders to maintain our leadership in HCI.
We believe vSAN’s software-first approach yields important benefits for our customers:
Accelerated innovation from software flexibility: Vendors can rapidly respond to customer needs by quickly delivering new software features and by immediately adopting independent hardware innovations, such as new flash and CPU technologies, from the rich partner ecosystem. As an example, VMware’s fast-pace of innovation has resulted in releases every six months with vSAN, and now every three months with VMC. This is a big change from legacy storage releases that have traditionally been 18-36 months apart.
Vendors focus on strong partner ecosystems: An open, software-based platform places a premium on strong partnerships as hardware lock-in disappears and customers have greater choice between different industry-standard server platforms and vendors. VMware’s investment in the vSAN ReadyLabs™ is one example of this that allows us to deliver appliance-like experiences with the flexibility of hardware choice. VMware has jointly certified over 500 ReadyNodes from over 15 OEM server vendors, from high-performance all-flash systems to ruggedized servers for use in austere environments.
Power a Digital Foundation: As customers shift some workloads to public clouds, like AWS, a software-based approach is the only way to ensure consistent infrastructure, operations and security from on-premises to the public cloud. We call this consistent management control plane from edge to core to cloud the Digital Foundation. This type of flexibility, like what is available today with VMware Cloud on AWS and hundreds of VMware Cloud Provider partners, helps extend HCI to many clouds without requiring new skillsets or application refactoring—the lift-and-shift approach to workloads can be a reality.
Learn More
- New to hyper-converged infrastructure and want to learn more? Read the HCI Guide for Dummies
- See third-party validation of vSAN’s leadership: VMware debuts as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for hyper-converged infrastructure. Read the report.
- See what’s new in vSAN 6.7, the latest release.
