The market for hyper-converged infrastructure products continues to evolve as vendors offer a wide range of integrated appliances to help organizations reduce costs and simplify management.

Research firm Gartner predicted that, by 2020, 20% of business-critical applications currently deployed on three-tier architecture will transition to hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), where software-defined compute and storage are combined into one scalable platform that can be controlled through a single management platform.

Hyper-convergence offers numerous benefits. In addition to helping an organization reduce costs, implementing an HCI system can reduce administrative burden and simplify management of your environment.

Here, we provide an overview of hyper-converged products from 10 leading HCI vendors: Cisco, Datrium, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Maxta, NetApp, Nutanix, Pivot3, Scale Computing and VMware.

Editor's note: TechTarget editors focused this article series on 10 market-leading vendors that offer software-defined storage and appliances. Our research included data from TechTarget surveys and reports from other well-respected research firms, including Gartner.