Which Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Vendors Lead 2023? A Forrester Wave Deep Dive

Forrester Wave Overview

In Q4 2023 Forrester released “The Forrester Wave™: Hyper‑Converged Infrastructure”, evaluating eleven HCI vendors and positioning them on a wave diagram similar to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

Leaders

Nutanix is highlighted for challenging the boundary between HCI and cloud‑native solutions, leveraging its reputation for simplifying infrastructure complexity and maintaining a Net Promoter Score above 90 points. It holds the second‑largest market share by revenue and customers.

VMware remains the market leader with its rebuilt vSAN 8 offering improved performance, cloud capabilities, and scalability. VMware’s extensive partner ecosystem and multi‑pricing models support large enterprises, and its roadmap includes disaggregated HCI, network security, and data services.

Strong Performers

Microsoft focuses on blurring cloud‑edge boundaries through Azure Stack HCI, which can run independently or integrate with Azure for branch‑office and remote‑site workloads.

HPE offers SimpliVity within the GreenLake private‑cloud portfolio, providing federated storage for VMware environments. Its roadmap is conservative but includes support for vSphere 8, hybrid‑cloud integration, and NVMe drivers.

Sangfor Technologies delivers HCI as part of its Cloud Platform, with strong identity‑management features and a China‑centric customer base. Its roadmap emphasizes networking, RDMA, storage, and security, though it is shorter than competitors’.

Cisco continues with HyperFlex, built on the 2017 Springpath acquisition and UCS platform. Cisco ranks third in the market but lacks a clear long‑term vision; upcoming features include AMD CPU support, vSphere 8, and hybrid‑cloud enhancements for VMs and containers.

Contenders

IEIT Systems offers the dSAN and InCloud Rail platforms, focusing on hardware acceleration, private‑cloud capabilities, and zero‑trust support, but needs stronger partner and pricing strategies to compete internationally.

IBM presents the Storage Fusion HCI, a bare‑metal Kubernetes solution integrating Red Hat OpenShift, Storage Protect Plus, and Storage Scale. While offering a one‑stop container environment, its minimum six‑node cluster and higher entry price limit adoption; roadmap items include regional replication and managed control‑plane services.

Scale Computing provides HyperCore for distributed edge environments, emphasizing high availability and a loyal customer base with NPS > 90. However, its roadmap lacks publicly disclosed features.

Huawei delivers FusionCube HCI, aiming to support digital transformation with strong market share in APAC, yet its partner ecosystem and community engagement require improvement.

SmartX targets financial services and manufacturing with a pragmatic HCI vision, offering cost‑effective pricing and recent roadmap items such as file‑storage services, memory over‑provisioning, multi‑tenant operation, virtual private cloud support, and continuous data protection.

The report link is https://reprints2.forrester.com/#/assets/2/1474/RES178477/report.