Today, VMware was recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Q3 20181. VMware believes that this recognition is validation of our products’ increasing value to customers, and as the market continues to shift to a software-only, full stack solution (championed by VMware since inception), VMware will continue to drive leadership in this industry.
VMware Receives the Highest Score in the Strategy Category
Top analysts continue to recognize VMware’s strategic leadership, and Forrester scored VMware highest in the strategy category of the Wave1. VMware has not only set a vision for where the industry should go but delivered on that vision with tangible benefits delivered to customers. Since 2016, vSAN has added deduplication, compression, erasure coding, health services, FIPS 140-2 validated encryption, up to 150K IOPS per node, proactive support and many other benefits. The vSAN Private Beta, announced at VMworld on August 27th, 2018, showcases exciting, new capabilities that show VMware’s commitment to innovation: data protection, file services, and native persistent storage for cloud native applications (CNA).
VMware HCI Use Growing for Business-Critical Applications
Organizations of all sizes and across verticals rely on VMware HCI to power their business-critical applications. Although virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) was the first great use case for HCI, customers have quickly expanded the role of HCI in the data center: over 60% of VMware HCI users run business-critical applications, such as Microsoft SQL2. Users also report running Oracle, SAP, and MySQL. Customers are drawn to HCI’s simplified operations and management, rich feature sets and cost-efficient performance. In addition, vSAN is being used for next-generation applications, which are increasingly strategic for enterprises. VMware HCI provides key benefits for these deployments: enterprise-grade persistent storage for these applications, including data integrity features, intrinsic security, device management and data protection integration.
Key Factors Driving the Evolution of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Forrester notes that “increasing levels of virtualization created more complexity across data centers than anticipated or desired.” Once viewed as niche, HCI “has evolved rapidly to reach the mainstream1.” In order to provide the highest level of choice, VMware has developed product innovations and ecosystem partnerships to address factors that have propelled the HCI market forward.
- A growing ecosystem of certified business-critical applications. VMware has an enterprise-grade, mature partner ecosystem, with a large and still growing application ecosystem. VMware recently announced support for InterSystems Caché and IRIS Data Platform, Cloudera and DataStax. In addition, most HCI customers are running business-critical applications on vSAN, including MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle databases.
- Less complex operation to enable quick onboarding – vSAN is simple for VMware vSphere customers to adopt, as it is native to vSphere and requires no new tools. Over 50% of new vSAN users report they’re experts within a month of adoption2. With vSAN 6.7, VMware introduced a completely redesigned user interface, rebuilt from the ground up, with a clean, modern look. Dozens of workflows were significantly streamlined, reducing clicks by emphasizing the most common options, and net new workflows were added to reduce time-to-value for common operations.
- Enabling on-premises and IaaS and hybrid cloud. VMware’s leading partner ecosystem extends to public cloud providers, where customers can tightly integrate leading public clouds with their core data centers due to consistent operations, tooling and processes powered by VMware HCI. In addition, VMware offers native, multi-tenant HCI-as-a-Service with the leading public cloud provider, Amazon. Gartner recently acknowledged the VMware HCI supports the most hybrid cloud use cases of any HCI vendor in market today3.
Closing Thoughts
VMware has come a long way since 2016. VMware vSAN – a software-based HCI solution that integrates with the full stack (including networking and advanced management) and leading public clouds – has become the most adopted HCI solution in the market today. It delivers increased agility through simple, intuitive operations. lowers costs by reducing CAPEX, management OPEX and supports the most hybrid cloud use cases.
To learn why VMware is a Leader in the Forrester Wave™, download the report.
Citations
1Chhabra, N., Lipson, A., O’Donnell, G. & Nagel, B. (2018, September 25). The Forrester Wave: Hyperconverged Infrastructure. Retrieved from Forrester database.
3vSAN TechValidate Customer Survey, 2017. TVID: 722-939-1E6, published July 18, 2017
3Chandrasekaran, A., Skorupa, J., Rao, S., & Weiss, G. (2018, March 20). Four Factors That Will Shape The Future of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (ID: G00346762). Retrieved from Gartner database.
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