Yesterday at VMworld Las Vegas, as part of their major news release for the day, VMware announced a new HCI offering targeted at distributed IT environments – the HCI Acceleration Kit. We at StorMagic agree with almost everything they are talking about – except the complexity and cost. VMware’s new HCI solution requires three physical servers at every location. StorMagic only requires two. These small IT environments typically involve dozens, hundreds or even thousands of locations – so one extra server at each site adds unnecessary complexity and drives the total cost through the roof.
You can read about VMware’s new offering, the HCI Acceleration Kit here.
StorMagic designed and developed a two server solution specifically for SMEs and distributed IT environments like retail stores, branch offices, factories, warehouses and even wind farms and oil rigs. Many of these locations have limited network bandwidth, but still require a highly-available hyperconverged IT solution. Our software is lightweight (requires very little compute and network resource) and extremely cost effective (a two-server cluster starts at under $10,000 – depending on the server manufacturer the customer chooses). vSAN is an excellent datacenter-class virtual SAN solution, but likely doesn’t meet the needs of the smaller sites at the edge of the enterprise. They’ve lowered the cost of the total solution by 10% to get the starting price point under $25,000. (The announcement mentions a 25% discount off vSphere and vSAN software, but when the cost of three servers is included, the overall savings is more like $2500, or 10%).
The bottom line is that both companies believe the same thing – the distributed IT market is exploding because more and more computing and data collection is being done at the edge, thanks to IoT and the growth of other business-critical applications. The difference is that StorMagic has always been focused on the needs of smaller sites and VMware has been more focused on datacenter requirements.
