Dell Technologies and VMware again dominate the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market, according to IDC’s first quarter 2019 Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker. And for the first time, IDC expanded its definition of HCI systems. It added a “new breed” called disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure and says NetApp HCI is an example of this.

IDC tracks the converged infrastructure market quarterly, and segments the market into three groups: certified reference systems and integrated infrastructure, integrated platforms, and HCI systems. HCI is always the fastest growing of these three segments — and the most competitive among vendors.

Worldwide revenue from hyperconverged systems sales grew 46.7% year over year during the first quarter, generating $1.8 billion worth of sales. This amounted to 48.6% of the total converged systems market, according to IDC. Meanwhile the entire converged systems market revenue increased 19.3% year over year to $3.75 billion.

“Hyperconverged infrastructure remains the primary growth driver in the converged systems market,” said Sebastian Lagana, research manager for infrastructure platforms and technologies at IDC. “Reduced operating complexity, ease of deployment, and excellent fit within hybrid cloud environments continue to drive HCI adoption across a broad range of customers and workloads.”

HCI systems combine networking, compute, storage, and usually a hypervisor into a single, scale-out box using x86 server-based resources.

IDC ranks HCI supplier in two ways: by the brand of the hyperconverged product or by the owner of the software providing the core hyperconverged capabilities. Because Dell Technologies owns 81% of VMware, it’s safe to say that Dell Technologies came out on top in both rankings.

As it relates to the branded view of the hyperconverged systems market, Dell Technologies was the largest supplier with $586.7 million in revenue and a 32.2% share. Nutanix, in second place, generated $255.7 million in branded revenue. This represented 14% of the total HCI market during the quarter. HPE was the third largest branded HCI vendor, with $83.5 million in revenue or 4.6% market share.

From the software ownership view of the market, systems running VMware hyperconverged software represented $750.7 million in total first quarter vendor revenue, or 41.1% of the total market. Systems running Nutanix hyperconverged software represented $526.5 million in first quarter vendor revenue, or 28.9% of the total market. Both amounts represent sales of all HCI software and hardware, regardless of how it was branded.

This follows a Gartner report published last month that said Nutanix beat VMware to win 47.8% of the HCI software market in the fourth quarter of 2018. Gartner said Nutanix raked in $206 million in HCI revenue during the quarter, compared to VMware, which brought in $190 million in revenue with 44.1% market share.

And about the new category — disaggregated HCI — these systems support separate compute and storage nodes that can be scaled independently of each other. NetApp HCI, which offers non-linear scaling of the hyperconverged cluster unlike traditional systems that require nodes running a hypervisor, is an example. Its storage nodes do not have a hypervisor at all since they don’t have to run virtual machines or applications.

NetApp says this approach makes hybrid cloud with HCI even easier, and just last week it added new Kubernetes and cloud data services to its HCI systems. The move makes on-premises HCI deployments look like just another public cloud region, said Jennifer Meyer, vice president of cloud data services marketing, in an earlier interview with SDxCentral.

In a blog post today, Dean Steadman, NetApp HCI product manager, cheers the updated IDC taxonomy and says adding disaggregated HCI “also leaves room for other future subcategories for containers and microservices. As IDC states, ‘this is a niche market with big potential.’ NetApp agrees.”