The HCI market continues its meteoric rise into the IT stratosphere. COVID has had a significant impact on us all, and the hyperconverged infrastructure market itself. MarketWatch.com reports, “In 2019, the global Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) market size was USD 2252.8 million and it is expected to reach USD 10150 million by the end of 2026, with a CAGR of 23.8% during the forecast period 2021-2026.” With HCI technology becoming so sought after, the next big question is which vendor to work with. Choosing the wrong vendor is a disaster – and could potentially have you locked into a bad IT relationship for years. Let’s explore a few of the things to research when choosing your first or next hyperconverged vendor.
What is Hyper-Converged Infrastructure?
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions were designed to provide enterprises with computing, storage, and networking all on a cloud-based platform, making both management and deployment easier and faster. While hyperconverged vendors once only created hyperconverged integrated systems (HCIS) and were lone hardware providers, the market has shifted and evolved to create HCI, which now provides virtual computing, storage and networking with a highly scalable, secure and power infrastructure. With HCI you get unified management, easy and secure storage, high availability and data services. Selecting the best HCI vendor to work with is important, and with so many out there, how do you decide which vendor is right for you? Some vendors focus on a specific region or vertical, while some vendors are still in the early stages of their HCI development.
Choosing a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Vendor
The three most important factors in choosing an HCI vendor are vendor support, management, and price. However, once you’ve determined the rest, there are a few more suggestions on great places to get first-hand information from current users. But first, let's discuss support.
HCI Vendor: Support
It’s critical to have local support in your local language for a solution like HCI which is vital to your business. This is an especially unique issue for those in the APAC and European regions, where countries are close, travel is easy, and business is routinely done across borders. As HCI is so critical to the success of an enterprise, it’s vital to work with a vendor who is available 24/7 with only one call. If something isn’t working correctly with your HCI solution, the last thing you want to do is fill out paperwork, sit on hold, and wait for traveling technicians.
HCI Vendor: Management & Performance
Management of your HCI solution should be easy. While experienced IT staff is critical to the success of any enterprise, HCI should make your daily management of the network and everyone using it easy and simple. Of what benefit is an HCI solution that is too difficult to manage?
There are several elements of HCI that could potentially affect performance. For example, computing power has a direct effect on the performance of your HCI solution. Discuss this with your chosen HCI vendor to determine how much power you need and how much you have available. Your chosen HCI vendor should be excited to have this conversation with you, and custom builds a solution that meets all your needs.
HCI Vendor: Price
Price is a tricky topic, as list-price often changes depending on the time of year or business quarter. In addition, you are ideally working with an HCI vendor which will custom build your HCI to your specifications – meaning the price is what you make it. Our first suggestion is to work with a vendor who can work with you on the price and fulfill your needs. HCI should not be a one-size-fits-all solution. A few of the functions you should consider paying for are: data compression and resiliency, hardware and software savings, and operational savings.
Read Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) Vendor Reviews!
A quick search can give you all the info you need on each hyperconverged vendor out there. For example, solutionsreview.com offers a quick rundown of Sangfor Technologies HCI solution, and what you can expect from working with them:
“Sangfor Technologies provides IT infrastructure solutions, specializing in cloud computing, network security, and network optimization. Its HCI software platform is designed for data center modernization, enterprise application, cloud transformation, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), backup, and disaster recovery. Sangfor also has its own hypervisor, enabling Sangfor HCI to provide a secure, managed platform for small and midsize enterprises. The provider also has an industry-vertical market approach, creating partnerships with independent software vendors and developing knowledge of specific regulations in order to meet the needs of government, healthcare, manufacturing, and education organizations."
Gartner Inc. is usually the first choice for IT experts looking for first-hand information from their peers. In a recent Gartner Peer Insights review entitled Sangfor HCI Can Manage From Single-Cluster HCI to Multi-Cluster HCI And Provide Cloud, a Sangfor HCI user wrote,
"Our organization has adopts the Sangfor HCI for " Software Defined Data Center". The Sangfor HCI has good elastic expansion capabilities. When a new physical machine is added, data can be automatically migrated and balanced. When a disk or physical machine fails, it can achieve data reconstruction of about 20min/T, which is very good Stability and self-healing capabilities; the platform can easily realize virtual machine micro-isolation and east-west security protection. Later, different levels of security protection strategies can be set for different virtual machine services to ensure data and virtual machine security. In addition, Sangfor HCI can initiate active health detection on the business rather than the virtual machine itself, and display the usage status of all resources on the cloud platform such as Oracle database, SQL database, weblogic middleware, etc. on a large screen monitoring center, which is very easy to use and easy to manage. And through the cloud management platform to unify the hyper-converged clusters of the main and standby computer rooms, instead of relying on third-party software, the centralized management of the resources of the main and standby computer rooms and the monitoring of disaster recovery status are realized.” [SIC]
Sangfor Technologies is an APAC-based, global leading vendor of IT infrastructure solutions specializing in Network Security and Cloud Computing. Visit us at www.sangfor.com to learn more about Sangfor’s Security solutions and ransomware protection, and let Sangfor make your IT simpler, more secure, and valuable.
