The booming hyperconverged infrastructure space has a new company in the mix now that startups Gridstore and DCHQ have merged to create HyperGrid, a vendor that officials say is offering a hyperconverged infrastructure-as-a-service.
HyperGrid officials announced the Gridstore-DCHQ deal July 25, though no financial details were announced. The company is looking to combine Gridstore’s hyperconverged all-flash infrastructure with DCHQ’s software platform, which automatically moves and manages applications across cloud and container environments. The result is an offering that provides a hyperconverged infrastructure that comes with a pay-as-you-consume pricing model.
Through the new HyperGrid offering, businesses can create a cloud-like environment similar to something like Amazon Web Services (AWS) in their own data centers.
The hyperconverged infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) delivers a highly-scalable, application-aware environment that can help businesses lower their up-front and operational costs, work with a range of hypervisor and container technologies, and provide one-click application deployment and orchestration, according to Nariman Teymourian, who took over as Gridstore chairman and CEO in May.
“Our solution gives customers what they have been asking for—an enterprise-grade platform for innovation that is simple to use, agile and scales elastically with a pay-as-you consume pricing model,” Teymourian said in a statement. “Customers will now be able to achieve all the benefits of the cloud, without being locked in to a specific vendor.”
Hyperconverged infrastructure is the fastest growing space in the larger converged infrastructure market, according to industry analysts. In the first quarter, the hyperconverged segment jumped 148 percent, to $371.9 million, according to IDC analysts. They also expect the market to increase from $981.91 million last year to more than $4.7 billion by 2019. Gartner analysts said the space will reach $2 billion this year, and almost $5 billion by 2019.
Among the key drivers in the growth of hyperconverged infrastructures are the increasing complexity and costs of data centers, fueled by such trends as the proliferation of mobile devices, data analytics, the Internet of things, virtualization and the cloud. There also is a growing lack of IT professionals who have the skills to handle the growing complexity, and the problem of obsolete legacy IT systems. Businesses also are looking for ways to more quickly develop and spin out services to their employees and customers.
Hyperconverged infrastructures offer tightly integrated appliances that include compute, storage, network, virtualization and management software in a single system. Top-tier OEMs, including Dell, Lenovo, EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, are offering hyperconverged offerings, while vendors like Nutanix and SimpliVity sell software for hyperconverged environments. Hyperconverged infrastructure vendor Pivot3, months after buying storage technology vendor NextGen, in June announced the first joint products, the vStac SLX.
HyperGrid sells the appliances that Gridstore brought into the merger, while DCHQ provided the software, which includes HyperForm for application delivery, HyperWeave elastic infrastructure and HyperVue for central management. DCHQ’s technology containerizes traditional applications, enabling businesses to automatically deploy and manage both traditional and cloud-native workloads across an array of cloud and container environments, from VMware’s vSphere and Microsoft’s Azure and Hyper-V to Docker, Mesosphere, KVM, OpenStack, AWS and bare-metal, according to company officials.
HyperGrid, through its time as Gridstore, has gained traction in the space, they said. There are 250 installs of the company’s appliances, 25 percent of its sales are repeat sales and it has grown revenue by 343 percent since last year, officials said.
Gridstore was founded in 2009 and has received about $44 million in funding. DCHQ was launched last year. HyperGrid’s hyperconverged IaaS is available immediately.