Nutanix Tops Gartner's Magic Quadrant For Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Magic Quadrant

Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), which combines server, storage and networking technologies inside a single platform, is making inroads in the enterprise in 2018, according to Gartner. HCI pioneer Nutanix was ranked the top vendor on Gartner's 2018 quadrant.

"Nutanix is ranked the highest in vision and execution on the Magic Quadrant. They have about 7,800 customers right now. Their deployments are mostly in large centralized data centers rather than smaller sites," said Mark Haranas, senior associate editor at CRN. "Against some of the stiff competition like Dell EMC and HP, Nutanix came out on top. These bigger competitors can sometimes underprice them, but Nutanix is now best-of-breed software.

"Somewhat shocking is that Cisco didn’t make the leadership board in this Magic Quadrant," he added. "Gartner ranked them high on execution, but not so much on vision. So, they’re going to need to make some changes as far as their vision strategy to make that leader board."

Software company Pivot3 also shows promise, ranked as a challenger on the Magic Quadrant. The small company is in high demand largely due to its hyper-converged solution for video surveillance.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 20 percent of business-critical applications currently deployed on three-tier IT infrastructure will transition to hyper-converged infrastructure.