Chinese Hyperconvergence Leader SmartX Recognized by Gartner, Authoritative Global Market Research Firm
Gartner released its China hyperconverged infrastructure market landscape report, with SmartX ranking alongside top-tier international vendors on the strength of its core technology and "production-ready" products.
Recently, international research and advisory firm Gartner released its report Competitive Landscape: Hyperconverged Infrastructure, China, analyzing trends in China's hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market and surveying the competitive landscape among representative vendors. SmartX (Beijing Zhiling Haina Technology Co., Ltd.), a leading domestic provider of HCI and distributed block storage solutions, was identified as one of the report's key focus companies. According to the report, independently controllable core technology and "production-ready" products have become SmartX's differentiating strengths in the market.
The report begins by outlining key development trends in China's HCI market, noting:
The global HCI market continues to grow rapidly. Gartner forecasts a compound annual growth rate of 23% through 2023, with China following the same trajectory;
The HCI market is expanding from mid-sized customers to large enterprises, with use cases evolving from server virtualization, VDI, and branch office scenarios to mission-critical workloads such as databases and cloud;
Large and mid-sized enterprises have low adoption rates for public cloud, with a cloud migration rate of just 11% in 2018. Hybrid cloud remains in early stages; instead, users prefer deploying cloud-like infrastructure in private environments.
In the report, Gartner lists several mainstream HCI players in China, including SmartX, Nutanix, Dell EMC, Huawei, and Sangfor. Dell EMC, Huawei, and Sangfor leverage years of customer and channel accumulation in the data center market to achieve rapid market coverage. Product-focused vendors like SmartX and Nutanix, meanwhile, compete through product differentiation.
Founded in 2013, SmartX has remained focused on HCI and distributed block storage technology, making it one of the first and most dedicated professional vendors to explore this space in China. The Gartner report notes that all of SmartX's storage core code is independently developed and controllable. This self-developed core technology enables its HCI systems to achieve superior performance and reliability. SmartX's flagship product — the SMTX OS hyperconverged system — serves as the foundation for building elastic and agile HCI infrastructure. It includes a built-in virtualization service based on KVM (called ELF, with no additional licensing required), distributed block storage, and a web management module. Additionally, SMTX OS supports vSphere and Xen, and can run on certified servers from nearly all mainstream x86 server vendors.
Excerpt from the Gartner report on SmartX
Beyond product differentiation, the Gartner report also thoroughly summarizes SmartX's industry expansion and customer service capabilities.
Excerpt from the Gartner report on SmartX
The report states that SmartX has successfully introduced HCI and distributed block storage into major financial sub-sectors, large hospitals, and high-end manufacturing. For these industries, IT infrastructure demands extremely high reliability and security. Based on its independently controllable core technology, SmartX's "production-ready" HCI products have fully earned customer confidence and trust, with deployments in relevant production systems to support mission-critical business and drive infrastructure buildout and modernization. In the HCI segment, SmartX holds advantages in response time and service efficiency compared to competition from top-tier international vendors like Nutanix and VMware. This dual strength in product and service has won SmartX a loyal customer base while supporting substantial business growth, with customers in finance and other sectors expressing strong confidence in SmartX's products.
Furthermore, as a dedicated HCI vendor, SmartX has built a broad and open ecosystem spanning partners from underlying server hardware and virtualization to upper-layer cloud management platforms. Currently, SmartX works with OpenStack and domestic cloud management platforms to jointly build cloud infrastructure, supporting enterprise digital transformation. SmartX also deepens partnerships with specialized firms to enhance data services capabilities and security, meeting user needs for backup and data protection. To support containerized workloads, SMTX OS supports the Kubernetes CSI plugin and has achieved effective integration with Rancher, a leading container management software provider.
Going forward, powered by independently controllable core technology and "production-ready" products, SmartX will continue to push forward comprehensively on product development, customer service, and ecosystem partnerships — persistently climbing the HCI "cliff" and maintaining its distinctive position in this intensely competitive market.
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