VMware executives expect to continue the successful hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) partnership with Dell Technologies, and also see potential for more collaboration with other vendors after the Dell-VMware spinoff.

The spinoff is on schedule to happen by the end of November. The two companies announced earlier this spring they’d reached a deal to create two separate companies, but preserve their “strategic partnership.”

“Dell has been, and is, and will be such a great partner for us on HCI. We co-engineered the VxRail, which is Dell's appliance that they sell based on VMware vSAN,” said John Gilmartin, SVP and GM of the Cloud Platforms Business Unit at VMware, in an interview with SDxCentral during VMworld. “So it’s been a tremendously successful partnership for both of us.”

VxRail is Dell’s HCI system, based on the latest-generation Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. VMware vSAN is the vendor's software-defined storage product in the HCI stack.

Gilmartin anticipates the partnership will continue going forward because it’s beneficial for both companies. “We have a strong mutual interest in continuing to go win in the HCI space, and Dell is invested in our platform,” he said. “So I don't see the spin having either a positive or negative, or really meaningful impact one way or the other.”

Gilmartin also pointed out that under Dell, VMware has pursued and maintains good partnerships with other vendors including Lenovo, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Fujitsu.

“Dell, as our parent for last couple of years, has done a great job of acknowledging that VMware is a company that requires an ecosystem,” Gilmartin said. “That's what makes us successful as a platform, both in virtualization, but also in HCI.” Almost every server vendor is qualified with VMware vSAN as a hardware partner, he added.

However, he noted, “maybe there's a potential for a little more collaboration on the go-to-market side as those companies become more comfortable.”

“HCI is the path to modernization,” Gilmartin said. “HCI is the No. 1 strategy that people are pursuing to modernize on-prem infrastructure and to get it to a similar level with their cloud options.”

He said HCI accelerates transformation initiatives with capabilities that lower costs, rapidly scale to support input/output (I/O) intensive workloads, and simplify operation and administration.

HCI has evolved as a market, which used to be primarily about storage. Accordingly, VMware's HCI portfolio grew from vSan to VMware Cloud Foundation, a full-stack architecture that brings software-defined capabilities to standard x86 architecture and scales out to networking and management, Gilmartin said.

VMware Cloud Foundation is the company’s hybrid cloud platform for managing virtual machines (VMs) and containers. The integrated software stack bundles VMware’s vSphere virtualization software with vSAN for storage virtualization, NSX for network virtualization, and vRealize for cloud management.

“It’s the architectural building block for our multicloud platform,” Gilmartin said.

In addition, VMware partners with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver Cloud Foundation software-as-a-service for VMware Cloud on AWS along with similar partnerships with all of the other major cloud providers including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM, Oracle, and Alibaba.

Gilmartin cited IDC’s recent report that found 43.5% of hyperconverged solutions run VMware vSAN. The report also shows that worldwide revenue from hyperconverged systems grew 7.4% year over year during the fourth quarter of 2020 to $2.5 billion, which represented 54.2% of the total converged systems market.

He credited the market growth to the trend of running mission-critical businesses applications on top of the “easier to manage, more efficient, more scalable” HCI.

HCI “has really gone from being a sort of a supporting use case to being the main 80% storage for many customers, including very large financial services institutions, with mission-critical applications running on top of it,” Gilmartin said.