Reply to post:

My guess

Vendor A - Nutanix

Vendor B - Dell/EMC

Vendor C - HPE (LeftHand VSA)

See? Wasn't so hard.

We are going to see the usual storage industry butthurt howling from all the usual suspects but Chris, you've been in this so long, you sure could have done better? How about some insight what a piece of crap VSAN really is. And how surprising it is that Nutanix isn't actually as bad as everyone thought. Don't get me wrong, Nutanix storage performance totally sucks if you try to do anything useful but the less than mediocre performance is probably good enough for all those suckers that run it at 10% utilization (like their large government customers).

Let's be real for a moment. Hyperconverged was a stupid marketing fad championed by Nutanix to sell Software Defined Storage. Now that SDS is finally accepted we are seeing all the usual enterprise relevant features and criteria move front and center: performance, consistency & predictability, scalability, support, et al.

The real story here is how Dell/EMC completely shat the bed with choosing VSAN as their enterprise SDS and how Pat Gelsinger overruled the old guard at EMC. And how Meg saw that circus and told everyone to hold her beer because she could screw it up even more by acquiring SimpliVity.

SDS is moving front and center into the enterprise and all these morons do is acquire SMB software and somehow try to shoehorn it into the data center. Kudos to Cisco for trying to do the right thing here.