Major SDS / Hyperconverged Infrastructure Update

Many things have happened in the time interval between our last major comparison update back in January 2019 and now in the SDS & hyperconverged space. Because today’s update covers so many different items, we thought it best to accompany the update with a blog highlighting the best bits for you on a month-by-month basis. So check back regularly. (See the always “up-to-date” SDS & HCI Comparison here)

February 2019 – Pivot3 Acuity Storage Appliances and SRM support

With the launch of Pivot3 Acuity 10.6.1, the Datacenter platform expanded its Hyperconverged model line-up with storage-only nodes, as well as providing new capacity options for X5 hybrid nodes by adding 10TB and 12TB harddisks. Pivot3 also updated its Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) software and now supports the most recent versions of VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), 8.2 and 8.1.

March 2019 – Dell EMC VxRail & VxFlex OS, HPE VSA, HPE SimpliVity

Dell EMC delivered a minor update for its VMware vSAN-based VxRail platform. Version 4.7.100 introduced support for 2-node clusters and a VxRail Manager Plugin for VMware vCenter, as well as some RESTful API enhancements.

Halfway through March HPE signaled StorageVirtual VSA’s official end-of-life announcement. The product will mainly receive only minor updates related to security and integrity until the end-of-support date which has been slated for December 31^st 2022. Based on this end-date the Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) as we come to know it will have had a lifespan of 10 years.

HPE SimpliVity received a minor update again, its 9^th since the release of 3.7.0 back in June 2017. OmniStack 3.7.8 introduces support for larger clusters per Federation (48 instead of 16) when using multiple vCenter Servers in Enhanced Linked Mode. It also brings support for VMware Horizon Instant Clone provisioning technology. Next to this there is expanded functionality for the Hyper-V add-in.

At the turn of the month came possibly this year’s biggest surprise yet: the actual release of VxFlex OS (previously ScaleIO) 3.0. This major version update was already promised by Dell EMC in May 2017 and was to arrive later that same year. The biggest innovations: persistent integrity checks, snapshot policy management and inline data compression.

April 2019 – Cisco HyperFlex

Just before the month ended Cisco released HyperFlex 4.0, following its trusty bi-annual update cycle. Here’s the 4^th generation platform update in a nutshell: vSphere 6.7U2 and Hyper-V 2019 support, an official HX-CSI Plugin for Kubernetes 1.13+, an official HyperFlex Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) for integration with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 8.1 and 6.5, the introduction of Edge clusters consisting of 2-4 nodes,  and support for C480 ML compute-only nodes.

May 2019 – Datrium DVX, Dell EMC VxRail

Dell EMC delivered yet another minor update for VxRail. Version 4.7.200 mainly brings VMware vSphere 6.7 U2 component support.

Last but not least, Datrium provided a major platform update by releasing DVX 5.0.1.0. Software-wise the 5^th generation platform mostly shows enhancements in the disaster recovery area. It introduces Datrium ControlShift, a SaaS application for workload mobility and DR orchestration for on-premises DVXs (Generally Available) and Cloud DVXs (VMware Cloud on AWS is currently Tech Preview). Hardware-wise there are now more models and sub-models to choose from, expanding the range of CPU/memory options as well as capacity.

And the others (SDS & Hyperconverged)…?

As you might have already noticed, there are some SDS & Hyperconverged infrastructure platforms that haven’t released any new capabilities since February 2019: Nutanix ECP, DataCore SANsymphony, VMware vSAN, NetApp HCI and Microsoft S2D. Of course we’ll be keeping a close eye on how things will progress further down the road in 2019 and beyond.

Want to go in-depth on all recent SDS/HCI improvements? Then by all means please go straight to our updated comparison of SDS & HCI solutions by clicking here.

Herman Rutten – WhatMatrix Category Analyst [SDS & HCI]

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Herman Rutten

Technical consultant and Solutions architect with 20 years of field experience. At first focused on on-premises IT Infrastructure including enterprise servers, storage, virtualization, backup/restore and disaster recovery. Following evolutionary industry changes the scope has gradually broadened to public cloud, data security, hybrid connectivity and advanced analytics. Category Lead for the independent WhatMatrix Analyst community since 2015.

Latest posts by Herman Rutten (see all)

• StarWind HyperConverged Appliance enters the WhatMatrix - December 3, 2019
• SDS & HCI Updates: Nutanix, NetApp, vSAN, HPE - September 3, 2019
• WhatMatrix adds Scale Computing HC3 to SDS/HCI Lineup - June 5, 2019