Partners praise Microsoft's HCI move
Microsoft partners with 15 vendors for hyperconverged Azure Stack offering
Partners have welcomed Microsoft's latest news of its introduction of Azure Stack HCI, with one exec describing it as "potentially offering huge value".
Microsoft says Azure Stack HCI offers customers the ability to run virtualised applications on hyper-converged infrastructure while also featuring the same software-defined compute, storage, and networking software as Azure Stack.
Tanaz Gould, consultancy director of global reseller Claranet, said that Microsoft is responding to customer hesitancy to fully embrace public cloud.
"From a top-level view, it's a very interesting development. It's very much in line with what we're seeing from customers in terms of private cloud infrastructure deployments; they're increasingly more HCI driven," she said.
Azure Stack HCI solutions will be available from 15 HCI hardware vendors: ASUS, Axellio, bluechip, DataON, Dell EMC, Fujitsu, HPE, Hitachi, Huawei, Lenovo, NEC, primeLine Solutions, QCT, SecureGUARD, and Supermicro.
"For Microsoft to open up Azure Stack on a choice of HCI providers instead of the previous model they had, will create more acceptance in the market," Gould added.
"People are going towards a hybrid cloud strategy. Microsoft is trying to push Azure Stack and people are driven towards HCI solutions to replace traditional infrastructure… I think HCI players will welcome this."
This reaction is echoed by Paul Stringfellow, technical director of UK-based data management consultancy Gardner Systems.
"HCI is not really about hardware, HCI is a software play. My take is that if you roll back a couple of years, a lot of HCI vendors were doing no more than saying ‘here's all the things that used to be in a big rack, look, we've squeezed them into this box. And if you want to scale out, here's some more boxes for you to stick together and we get a nice scale-out platform'," he said.
"However, that did not really add a lot of value other than making things a lot smaller. It wasn't providing you with a way of consuming the resources, not giving you automation tools, supplying you with marketplace or giving you a cloud-like experience.
"It wasn't very smart… We're now seeing that Microsoft is a smart software stack that can exploit HCI. This bridge between on-prem and what you want to do in public cloud has potentially huge value to people."
Stringfellow said he sees Microsoft's news as a response to the continuing growth in the HCI vendor market.
"Vendors are trying to make sure that their hardware platform is giving smart software stacks something that exploits its intelligence. Because for end-user consumers, they increasingly want a cloud-like experience," he said.
"Just buying a bit of hardware and a small box doesn't really do that."
As far as who will most welcome the development, Claranet's Tanaz Gould said that customers who are not willing to fully commit to public cloud infrastructure in the next three to five years will be particularly happy.
"What we see is that when customers are making decisions in terms of how their application landscape should be deployed, they're not looking beyond that time period. For some, for many reasons, they can't commit to moving their entire estate into one or multiple hyperscaler clouds," she said.
She added that looking across the market, she wouldn't be surprised if other infrastructure vendors followed suit.
"There is a lot of movement in this market from all players, not just Microsoft and AWS. It wouldn't surprise me if there were a development from Google Cloud, too."