VMware and Nutanix held onto their No. 1 and No. 2 hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software vendor titles, together representing 66.1% of the overall market, according to IDC’s latest Quarterly Worldwide Converged Systems Tracker.

HCI systems running VMware vSAN led the market for the third quarter of 2021, accounting for 41.5% of market share — higher than the following four vendors combined. VMware’s HCI revenue grew 17% year over year to $982 million, while more than 30,000 customers adopted vSAN, according to IDC and VMware.

Behind VMware, Nutanix’s HCI products generated $581 million in revenue, up 13.4% year over year. Its market share also increased from 11.5% to 24.6% during the same period. 

Additionally, Huawei, Cisco, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) made the top 5 HCI software vendor list. However, Cisco and HPE's HCI revenue declined during the quarter. Cisco accounted for 4.4% of the HCI market, and its revenue dropped 14% year over year to $104 million. Meanwhile HPE’s revenue decreased 7.7% to $82 million in the third quarter of last year.

Here is a look back at the top 2 vendors — VMware and Nutanix’s — HCI updates over the past year.

VMware vSAN storage is the basis for the vendor’s HCI offerings that combines storage, compute, networking and virtualization. But as application workloads grow, keeping storage and compute tied together can leave resources stranded across HCI clusters.

To address this challenge, VMware released vSAN HCI Mesh early last year. It's a software-based approach to disaggregating HCI compute and storage. This feature allows multiple vSAN clusters to create a disaggregated, cross-cluster architecture. It takes the issue of unused capacity off the table by making more efficient use of storage capacity.

This is part of VMware’s HCI portfolio expansion from vSan to Cloud Foundation: a full-stack architecture that brings software-defined capabilities to standard x86 architecture and scales out to networking and management.

VMware Cloud Foundation is the company’s hybrid cloud platform for managing virtual machines 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.

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

Gartner also recognized VMware’s HCI strategy specific to those cloud environments in its recent Magic Quadrant report, and it named the vendor as one of the two leaders in the market. But analysts pointed out VMware’s HCI offerings are among the most expensive, and the configuration of vSAN software can be challenging.

Nutanix is the other “leader” in Gartner’s HCI Magic Quadrant. Analysts recognized high customer satisfaction with the breadth and depth of Nutanix’s HCI software and its unified platform for multiple workloads and data services. 

The vendor’s public cloud product Nutanix Clusters on AWS allows customers to move legacy applications to the AWS public cloud (and back on-premises, should they so choose) without having to retool any code. It uses a built-in integration with the AWS networking layer, which also allows customers to use their existing AWS accounts, including unused credits, virtual private clouds, and subnets.

It takes on VMware Cloud on AWS by making it easier to manage workloads across hybrid clouds, Monica Kumar, SVP of marketing at Nutanix, told SDxCentral in an earlier interview. And it costs less compared to VMware because of Nutanix’s license portability and features built into Nutanix Clusters that can hibernate a customer’s entire AWS cluster when it’s not in use, she added.

However, Gartner analysts called out Nutanix Clusters, which has seen only modest customer traction and is not available in other public cloud platforms.

Nutanix plans to expand its platform to Azure soon. Nutanix Clusters on Microsoft Azure is in limited preview, and the company has not yet revealed a general availability date.

In addition to these top cloud partnerships, Nutanix plans to offer more cloud-provider choices in the future.