Hyper-convergence is becoming the key to faster digital transformation for enterprises. With fast cloud migration, simplified deployment, and easy management, hyper-convergence can help enterprises move to digitalization faster and maintain the speed of business innovation.
Indeed, with the advantages of rapid delivery and management of O&M, as well as the ability to quickly build a variety of "small but beautiful" infrastructure application environments in enterprise application scenarios, effectively avoiding duplicate construction and waste of resources, hyper-convergence has become a "must-have" for enterprise digital transformation, and the market has also shown stable growth.
It is precisely because of the customer needs on the demand side that Hongshan Technology released its new generation of cloud and hyper-converged self-developed products, officially entering the hyper-converged market with its own brand.
Hongshan Technology, the "new army" of the hyper-converged market, what is the confidence and courage to face the market?
The strong market demand is the driving force of Hongshan's self-developed hyper-integration
According to IDC's latest report, the hyper-converged market will grow by 2.9% year-on-year in 2023, reaching a market size of 15.201 billion yuan, and the market demand for hyper-converged system solutions remains strong.
In fact, as enterprise business needs become more and more diversified, although many standardized products have been formed in the cloud market, users' cloud needs still have pain points such as long construction cycle, high cost, complex architecture, and prominent compatibility problems, which makes hyper-convergence, which is known for rapid deployment and simple operation and maintenance, favored by many industry users.
Cao Shengnan, director of the cloud and hyper-converged product department of Hongshan Technology, also said, "From the perspective of the sales front-line, the demand for hyper-converged products from customers in education, healthcare, manufacturing and other industries has increased significantly. To better meet customer needs and ensure that customers are provided with high-quality services from the original factory, this is the main driving force for Hongshan's decision to develop its own hyper-converged products. ”
As he said, analyzing the growth of the hyper-converged market, the needs of industry customers are the most important factors, especially in education, medical care, manufacturing and other industries have a strong demand for the purchase of innovative products, and some enterprises will also have some clear innovative procurement KPIs.
In the past few years, hyper-convergence has been rapidly applied in new fields such as online meetings, online education, e-commerce, and live broadcasting, and has gradually become one of the mainstream ways for enterprises to move to the cloud.
According to the IDC report, the performance and stability needs of customers in various industries to meet the performance and stability needs of traditional production applications, the agility needs of modern cloud-native applications, and the needs of simple and unified management of edge computing scenarios will drive the hyperconverged market to maintain healthy growth in the next few years. At the same time, IDC also predicts that China's hyper-converged market will maintain a compound annual growth rate of 6.0% in the next five years.
In addition, hyper-convergence also carries the innovative applications and office systems of many enterprises, so it has also played an active role in the wave of localization, "The current market demand mainly comes from localized hyper-converged products, which is also the reason why Hongshan decided to take the self-research route and actively adapt to the domestic hardware ecology", Cao Shengnan said.
Based on these market trends and the evolution of demand, hyper-convergence is in a stable growth window. So, for such a "new army" as Hongshan Technology, where are its opportunities and core values?
Make up for the "shortcomings" of hyper-convergence
In the Chinese market, the competitive landscape of hyper-convergence is not simple.
In the early days, the hyper-converged market was full of flowers, including hardware products delivered in one piece and pure software products. On top of the standardized hardware base, there are also two different schools of thought: self-developed software and open source software. Different roles such as storage vendors, server vendors, and hyper-converged software providers are "fighting" with each other, making the hyper-converged market a "red ocean".
Cao Shengnan said, "Hongshan is not afraid of competition, because all our motivations are built on the basis of being able to better meet customer needs, as a provider of storage solutions positioned in the full line, Hongshan cannot and should not have the shortcoming of hyper-convergence!" ”
We know that the core advantage of Hongshan Technology is in the field of storage, and the base of hyper-convergence is distributed block storage, which itself is the housekeeping ability of Hongshan Technology. "Hyper-converged, the more stable the storage base, the stronger the performance, and our distributed storage performance, metadata, I/O path and other capabilities are stronger than domestic open source vendors, which is our advantage." Cao Shengnan said.
The technological evolution of hardware is logical, and in terms of software, in the process of serving customers through hyper-converged products, it has continuously run in its own hyper-converged software, which combines software and hardware to form a new hyper-converged product developed by Hongshan Technology.
This is the birth of "agile cloud and hyper-convergence".
It not only has 100% software and hardware decoupling, cloud platform modular deployment capabilities, and can provide performance output equivalent to VMware+VSAN, which can fully meet the expansion and replacement of domestic nodes, in addition to full-stack cloud solutions, 100% full-service management and other features, and the product can be delivered flexibly, both general models, information and innovation models, and support pure software and other delivery methods.
Cao Shengnan said that the reason why the new product is defined as "agile" is that it can manage different storage resources under the gimbal, realize the free flow of data, break the space constraints, and also have the hot migration function of data between different storages, which solves the problem of difficult circulation of storage resources for users." ”
The word "agile" is also reflected in the three keywords of light, fast and smart. Among them, "light" refers to the lightweight space, which only needs 4 cores and 8G space to deploy hyper-converged products, which greatly saves user capacity resources. "Fast" means that the one-click upgrade can be completed within 30 minutes, and the user's business does not need to be stopped, and the user's business operation and maintenance can be quickly helped. "Flexible" refers to flexible expansion, which can dynamically expand nodes horizontally in distributed storage mode, and vertically expand hard disks or cabinets in centralized storage, helping O&M to quickly expand capacity in different ways.
Objectively speaking, the hyper-converged market is a market where product power wins, and what industry customers value is the ability to simplify complex products, and have the capabilities of rapid deployment, stability and reliability, ultra-high performance, and high-quality services, which are the products that customers need most. From this point of view, Hongshan Technology's "agile cloud and hyper-convergence" is a good product that meets these standards.
Grasp the three "grasps" of service, product and industry
We know that with the development of cloud computing technology, the traditional architecture has revealed many drawbacks: the cooperation between software stacks is not smooth, and the cooperation between software and hardware cannot achieve linear growth in computing and storage performance with the increase of scale. As a result, infrastructure adjustments are being made in "cloud" data centers based on compute virtualization and storage virtualization. Compared with traditional private clouds, hyper-convergence has better horizontal expansion capabilities, vertical software upgrades, and business system support capabilities.
Because of this, more and more industry customers are willing to deploy innovative services to hyperconvergence. With the opening of user needs, the hyper-converged market itself has gradually entered a more orderly competitive environment, and vendors with better product and service capabilities have the opportunity to stand out.
A university customer in Zhejiang originally used the hyper-converged products of an international manufacturer, but because of the existence of personalized needs, the customer repeatedly proposed the demand for customized development to the factory, but failed to do so. Hongshan Technology, on the other hand, spent several months researching customer needs and finally realized customized functions. High-quality service has become the ultimate weight on the customer's psychological balance, and eventually many nodes of this international manufacturer have migrated to Hongshan Technology's products.
In this regard, Cao Shengnan said, "Service has always been Hongshan's housekeeping ability, and the purpose of our enterprise is customer demand first. Therefore, Hongshan has launched self-developed hyper-converged products, which is essentially to provide customers with more complete original services. Because the level of original service response is higher, it is more acceptable to users from a service perspective. ”
Of course, Hongshan Technology's product strength is also excellent. The newly released agile cloud and hyperconvergence offer four major benefits in itself:
1. The large integration of storage resources can easily realize the hot migration of different storage types without downtime. It has automatic interconnection with SAN storage interfaces, which can manage volumes at a fine-grained level and make full use of the advanced features of volumes, such as snapshots, active-active, and replication.
2. Simple and easy to use, easy operation and maintenance, complete installation and deployment within 30 minutes of launch, one-click online upgrade, no need to stop and wait.
3. Extreme performance, intelligent optimization, and can easily achieve millions of IOPS in small I/O read and write scenarios. The self-developed path has short I/O paths, low overhead, and excellent read and write performance.
4. Unified cloud management, on-demand use, easy integration of various resources. 100% fully decoupled, cost savings of more than 50%.
In the precipitation of industry customers, Hongshan Technology is not lagging behind. Cao Shengnan said, "Our strengths are in healthcare, education and government, and the needs of these industries are more in line with the characteristics of hyper-convergence. At the same time, in the financial fields such as banking, insurance, and securities, Hongshan's centralized storage has a good brand influence, so there will be expansion opportunities in these fields. ”
With the three "starting points" of services, products and industries, we have reason to believe that Hongshan Technology, the "new army" of the hyper-converged market, will become the "core force" in the future market.