Gartner defines distributed file systems and object storage as software and hardware appliance products that offer object and distributed file system technologies for unstructured data. Their purpose is to store, secure, protect and scale unstructured data with access over the network using file and object protocols, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Network File System (NFS) and Server Message Block (SMB).
Full-stack hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software provides a complete software solution that includes virtualized compute, storage and networking from a single instantiation running on server hardware. This market consists of those vendors that develop and sell hyperconverged infrastructure software comprising the vendor’s own server virtualization, software-defined storage and network management tools.