VMware is still the market leader of HCI software, according to IDC’s latest Worldwide Converged Systems Tracker for 2019 Q2. The tracker, which released on September 24, 2019, reported that VMware vSAN’s revenue was 38% of the total market and grew nearly 40% year over year! VMware has sprinted ahead to be the undisputed market leader for three consecutive quarters and has consistently grown faster than the market rate.
HCI continues to be a high growth industry in a roughly flat storage market. Where midrange storage is projected to grow roughly at a 3% CAGR through 2023, and entry level and high-end storage is forecast to decline through 2023, HCI is expected to grow at over 20% CAGR through 2023.
IDC Data Shows VMware is the #1 HCI Software
Let’s dig into the data. In the last quarter, Q2 2019, VMware vSAN was the market share leader based on systems running HCI software, with $694.1M in revenue, up from $497.7 million the year prior. During the quarter, the market grew as expected by a 23.4% rate, but vSAN grew 67% faster at a rate of 39.5%. VMware vSAN has over 20,000 customers, and over half the Global 2,000 run applications on vSAN. HCI adoption cuts across industries, and companies of all sizes are turning to HCI for their storage needs.
Keys to vSAN Adoption: Hybrid Cloud Ready, Deployment Flexibility
We believe there are two key contributors to vSAN’s continued growth: a clear path to hybrid cloud, and industry-leading deployment flexibility.
Clear Path to the Hybrid Cloud: VMware provides the clearest path to hybrid cloud of any HCI vendor. Most customers start with Core HCI, converged compute and storage on industry-standard x86 servers with unified management. To build a fully software-defined data center, customers can upgrade to an enterprise-grade, full-stack (compute, networking and storage virtualization), software-based solution for enhanced agility through faster cloud deployments, application provisioning and lower total cost of ownership. Finally, customers can incorporate public cloud with their private cloud environment and build a seamless hybrid cloud infrastructure with consistent processes and tooling across clouds. VMware now has partnerships with the six largest cloud vendors: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba and Oracle, as well as hundreds of other cloud providers. With consistency across clouds, businesses can run lean, efficient IT departments, without the need for a separate private and public cloud infrastructure teams. At the same time, businesses can easily leverage public cloud for its ability to scale rapidly, access to rich developer services and flexible, consumption-based payment models, while maintaining their core data center for cost-optimization for data-intensive applications, governance, control and familiar IT tools and processes.
Deployment Flexibility: VMware vSAN provides industry-leading deployment flexibility, and this year has added significantly to consumption-based payment options for HCI with Dell EMC and HPE. VMware recently announced participation with HPE GreenLake with VMware Cloud Foundation on HPE Synergy, which enables customers to take advantage of cloud-like payment models for their on-prem data centers. Also, at VMworld US, VMware announced the availability of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC combines the simplicity and agility of the public cloud with the security and control of on-premises infrastructure, delivered as-a-service to data center and edge locations. This fully-managed VMware service provides simple, secure, and scalable infrastructure for customer’s on-premises datacenter and edge locations. These services build on VMware’s extensive deployment options, including jointly-certified servers, or ReadyNodes, a turnkey appliance, Dell EMC VxRail, and HCI-as-a-Service from leading public cloud providers.
Learn More
New to hyperconverged infrastructure? Check out the VMware vSAN page
Read about the benefits of the latest release, vSAN 6.7 Update 3
Take a technical deep dive at StorageHub
Take our vSAN 6.7 Hands-On Lab here, and our vSAN 6.7 Advanced Hands-On Lab here!
