The HCI market is growing fast as customers refresh their server and storage hardware to modernize to a more agile and cost-effective data center. With analysts forecasting up to 66% annual growth[1], the world-wide HCI market will exceed $10B in 2021. VMware vSAN has been growing even faster than the overall HCI market, making HCI systems powered by vSAN the largest portion of the hyper-converged market, according to IDC[2].

By all accounts, HCI is now ready for primetime, supporting nearly any workload, from traditional business-critical and DR/DA to cloud-native and containers. The newly launched PowerEdge R6415 servers based on AMD EPYC processors provide even greater HCI deployment options for customers looking for fresh new choices and for the latest technologies.

With the rapid growth of computing outside of the data center, edge computing, including ROBO, IoT and similar workloads are a growing use case for HCI. The distributed nature of these applications drives the need for a flexible, cost-sensitive, and easily managed infrastructure. Too often, the cost and management targets for deployment at scale have precluded the use of enterprise-class storage. By contrast, the operating simplicity and lower TCO offered by the server-centric HCI architecture can be ideal or these workloads. To accelerate HCI in these growing market segments, last year VMware introduced an HCI Acceleration Kit with aggressive  entry-point pricing.

The new AMD EPYC-based servers offer edge and ROBO customers fresh new choices. These single-socket, higher-core count servers with more PCIe NVMe channels can improve compute and storage performance in workloads for which quick decisions and local processing are required. Combined with VMware HCI Acceleration Kit, customers now have lower-cost HCI entry point for ROBO and Edge use cases.

To learn more about vSAN certification on the new PowerEdge R6415 servers, read this story on our VMware partner site.

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[1] Gartner Forecast Analysis: Integrated Systems Worldwide, 1Q17 Update

[2] IDC’s 2Q2017 Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker