StorMagic launches SvHCI, challenges VMware in HCI market

Following Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, the market for hyper-converged solutions is experiencing significant movement. This week, server OEMs Dell, Lenovo, and HPE have extended their contracts with VMware. These agreements allow them to continue selling hyper-converged systems and servers with the VMware stack pre-installed, which is crucial for the OEMs as they lack their own hypervisors.

In line with this market trend, StorMagic has introduced its new hyper-converged infrastructure solution, StorMagic SvHCI. The company reports a significant increase in demand for such storage and compute architectures. StorMagic SvHCI aims to simplify operations and provide high availability using just two servers. Additionally, it offers existing VMware customers potential cost savings of up to 62%.

Bruce Kornfeld, Chief Product Officer at StorMagic, commented on the OEMs' new VMware agreements: "This new agreement is another datapoint proving that HCI is a highly desired way for end users to deploy IT solutions. The top 3 server OEMs were desperate to be able to sell VMware because they don’t have hypervisors of their own."

Kornfeld added that despite these new partnerships, VMware remains too expensive for edge and SMB use cases. StorMagic's approach focuses on providing an 'edge-first' solution designed to meet edge and SMB requirements with a cost-effective model independently of VMware.

StorMagic's recently announced SvHCI combines a hypervisor with virtual networking alongside its established virtual storage technology. This full-stack HCI solution is specifically designed for edge and small—to medium-sized business (SMB) environments. It also includes in-house 24x7x365 customer support.

According to StorMagic, the Gartner 2024 Market Guide for Full-Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software highlights a growing appetite for such architecture, anticipating that the 30% non-market-leading full-stack HCI installed base in 2024 will increase to 60% by 2029.

StorMagic SvHCI builds upon the company's SvSAN product, which ensures 100% uptime for customers using VMware or Microsoft hypervisors. SvHCI, a software solution that installs directly on new or existing servers, includes a KVM-based hypervisor, advanced virtual networking, and SvSAN as the storage software layer. Similar to SvSAN, SvHCI simplifies operations and delivers high availability in edge and SMB environments with only two servers, significantly reducing software costs.

Dan Beer, Chief Executive Officer of StorMagic, remarked, "StorMagic SvHCI delivers exactly what our customers and partners are telling us they need to run applications reliably at their edge and SMB sites. This solution is founded on the same tried and true SvSAN code we have been delivering to customers for more than a decade with over 50,000 installations around the world. With SvHCI, we're helping end users transition from costly, over-engineered, over-provisioned software running on VMware to our purpose-built and dependable solution, saving them up to 62% on software costs alone."

SvHCI will be generally available later this summer, starting at USD $2,049 for a one-year subscription for a single server with up to 2 TB of storage. Additionally, StorMagic has launched a Global Beta Program, providing customers and partners early access to the software for testing on their servers.