There's a lot going on right now in the Software-Defined Storage (SDS) and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) market.  And there are a host of platforms and vendors to consider.  VMware and Nutanix typically have the most brand name recognition right now thanks to massively large marketing budgets, but they aren't the only companies out there.  

There are of course other less vocal technology vendors, equally interesting, who are also challenging in this space.  So, who are they?  And how do you find them?  And more to the point, how do you compare these technologies to one another?  And do so easily.  Where can you go to get comprehensive information on which to base a fair comparison beyond the marketing slick where one vendor has all the check marks and the competition all have X's.  Yes, they still do that.

Comparison Matrix of SDS and HCI Companies via WhatMatrix

We've talked about WhatMatrix before on VMblog.  In January of this year, they launched a Disaster Recovery for Virtual Infrastructures comparison matrix, and then one month later in February, they came back with a Cloud Management Platform comparison matrix.

Here we are now in March, and these guys are back at it again, this time launching a new SDS and HCI comparison matrix.  

VMware recently announced its next major step in the evolution of their SDS platform -- Virtual SAN (VSAN) 6.2 -- where they introduced new capabilities including reduction techniques (de-duplication/compression), Quality-of Service (QoS) and enhanced monitoring.  

Not to be outdone, Nutanix countered VMware's announcement with one of their own, announcing the release of its Acropolis Operating Sytem (AOS) version 4.6, used with the company's Xtreme Compute Platform (XCP).  New features include hypervisor portability, self-service file recovery, one-click firmware upgrades and enhancements to existing features like Erasure Coding.

Keeping all these features straight

Over the last few weeks, the team at WhatMatrix has been hard at work, sorting through the latest technology updates, and going through their own process of gathering feedback and having healthy discussion in order to get to a more complete and even better SDS & HCI comparison matrix.  With this latest round of updates, you'll notice a massive number of additions as well as changes to the overall structure.  They now cover about 85 features in total across 4 platforms and 9 products!

The current matrix includes Atlantis Computing, Nutanix, Simplivity and VMware.  More may be added in the near future.



"With all the updates processed, where does that leave the platforms currently included?" asked Herman Rutten, WhatMatrix SDS & HCI category consultant.  "Nutanix XCP is still the best all-round platform with exciting new features on the way. VMware VSAN is doing a great job at catching up, while seemingly shifting the focus a little from hybrid to all-flash. SimpliVity DVP is definately still king where local and remote data protection features are concerned. Last but certainly not least the Atlantis USX platform has evolved immensely by adding enterprise features and offering a hyper-converged appliance."

You can compare any three systems at one time, simply by choosing the vendor, product and edition - for example: VMware, VSAN [SDS] / 6.2, Standard/Enterprise/Advanced/ROBO.

Once you've made your selections, you'll get a product matrix with comparisons across a host of categories like Architecture, Data Availability, Data Services, and Management.  And each of those high level categories are further broken down into many other sub categories and feature sets.

This is a free service, and definitely worth your time checking out.

Key features of WhatMatrix include:

• Multi-category comparison engine with color-coded evaluation scores to easily identify product advantages and limitations, comprehensive technical details and build-in feedback mechanism
• Interactive Stack-Builder (patent pending) - evaluate and apply complementary Add-Ons to improve functionality and overcome identified limitations
• Export & print evaluation reports
• Self-Service enabled community platform - create, upload and maintain your comparison on WhatMatrix, visibly promote your own expertise
• Industry Affiliates and Vendor Council
  

Go ahead, take a closer look!  Click here to compare SDS and HCI Technologies.