News

HyperGrid To Bring Hyperconverged Computing to AWS

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 07/25/2016

Hyperconverged computing is the latest technology to join the "as a service" bandwagon, and a company called HyperGrid is getting ready to bring it to the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud.

HyperGrid is the actually the new name of the combined company formed by Gridstore's acquisition of DCHQ. Gridstore has made a name for itself over the past few years in the rapidly growing market of hyperconverged systems with an emphasis in Microsoft Hyper-V environments. This week, the company acquired DCHQ, a supplier of container-based orchestration tools that work with Docker and Mesosphere, as well as traditional virtual environments such as Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, KVM, bare metal systems and OpenStack.

The newly minted HyperGrid offers what it touts as the first Hyperconverged Computing Infrastructure as a Service (HCIaaS). The HCIaaS consists of HyperGrid's hardware and public cloud services, as well as DCHQ's container-based development, orchestration, deployment and management environment, all integrated and delivered with consumption-based pricing. HyperGrid will bundle the software with its hyperconverged systems, which will also include subscriptions to public clouds. Availability will start with AWS, with Microsoft Azure and others to follow.

HyperGrid says offering the entire hardware, software and public cloud services bundled with consumption-based pricing will bring hyperconverged computing to organizations that otherwise can't afford it today. HyperGrid will offer companies usage-based hybrid cloud services with its hardware, software and public cloud service, all supplied and billed according to an organization's consumption over a given month.

For customers, it promises to lower the cost of acquiring hyperconverged systems and software, according to HyperGrid Chairman and CEO Nariman Teymourian.

Teymourian noted that HyperGrid can offer this consumption-based pricing because it doesn't have to concern itself with cannibalizing an existing commodity hardware business. Teymourian said he would know, having managed the hyperconverged systems business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) prior to its divestment from HP. Before that, he was an executive at Dell.

"Customers don't want to buy, they just want to rent it," Teymourian said. "They want it as services and to be able to use it when they need it just like they do with AWS."

Initially, HyperGrid will offer its services with the ability to scale out to AWS, with other popular cloud services -- including Azure, Digital Ocean and OpenStack -- in the pipeline in the coming months, Teymourian said.

"We can provide an AWS-like experience that you can control in datacenter or through a service provider and have it consumed as an AWS-like feature but at a significantly reduced cost," he said.

For several years before acquiring DCHQ, Gridstore had offered its appliances designed for Hyper-V environments for operations requiring high availability such as VDI, but the market for hyperconverged gear has become highly competitive. Dell, HPE, Lenovo and Cisco all have released or are readying new hyperconverged systems. In addition to the major suppliers, Gridstore competed with a number of other startups, including Nutanix, which is seeking to go public and has several OEM deals, as well as a partnership with Microsoft to deliver its Cloud Platform System (CPS).

Terri McClure, a senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, said the major hardware providers all offer sophisticated financing and consumption-based packages but HyperGrid's approach lends itself to organizations looking for a complete DevOps-based hybrid cloud offering.

"This could help to bridge the gap between the development and the operations groups when it comes to DevOps," she said. "HyperGrid is doing this with a bridge to the cloud so they don't have to put as much capacity on-premises."

A Dell official said the company offers cloud offerings supported by consumption-based pricing plus "other creative financing offers from Dell Financial Services. We offer this through a portfolio of Scale Ready Payment Solutions, designed to enable customer adoption of cloud solutions wherever they are on their cloud journey. The programs include Scale On Demand, Pay as you Grow and Provision and Pay, as well as its Cloud Flex Pay, which lets customers evaluate its DCHS gear for several months."

The market for what Gartner calls hyperconverged integrated systems (HCIS) is expected to grow by 79 percent to $2 billion this year, reaching $5 billion by 2019. The research firm predicts the technology will be widely used by enterprises and service providers within the next five years. Despite already dwarfing the traditional hardware and storage markets in terms of size, HCIS is still faster-growing, and is expected to eventually cannibalize the current systems and storage market.