Dell has added three more products to its XC range of hyperconverged storage arrays, the XC630-10 and two XC730, which are aimed at compute/performance-heavy, storage-focused and high-performance use cases.
Dell’s XC series devices marry Nutanix hyperconverged server and storage software with Dell PowerEdge hardware in new configurations.
As challenger banks and technology companies increasingly moving to the finance space, these findings add fuel to the fire.
The study, by the Centre for Alternative Finance at University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School and professional services organisation EY, looked at peer-to-peer lending platforms and other online alternatives such as equity-based crowdfunding.
It found the UK accounted for 74.3% of total lending using these alternative platforms. The research report said alternative finance platforms are close to becoming mainstream, particularly in countries such as the UK.
In Europe, the online alternative finance market grew by 144% last year, according to the study of 255 platforms in Europe, which covered between 85% and 90% of Europe’s online alternative finance market. The study also included input from 14 national or regional industry associations.
The report found that volumes have been growing steadily at around 75% year-on-year, but the number of businesses funded through these platforms has grown by 133% over the past three years. About 6,000 companies in Europe were funded this way in 2014.
Hyperconverged systems combine processing and storage in one box, with scale-out capability that allows the customer to grow capacity in grid-like fashion.
Their origins are in the hyperscale architectures developed by web giants like Facebook and Google, which build their own server/storage systems from discrete nodes with direct-attached storage.
Pre-configured hyperconverged products that have arisen in their wake allow easy setup and administration, with a virtual machine-friendly architecture for organisations without webscale resources.
Hyperconverged products first came from pioneers such as Nutanix, Simplivity and Scale Computing, and were aimed at fairly limited virtualisation use cases.
More recently, VMware has developed its own EVO:Rail product, which it sells in conjunction with a range of hardware suppliers, including Dell, EMC, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, Fujitsu and HP, and are now targeted at a wide range of datacentre workloads.