Say hello to VMware alternative Arcfra

Just under a year ago, Singapore-based startup Arcfra entered the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market and recognized in a Gartner’s Market Guide for Full-Stack HCI Software less than a year after launch. It’s said it’s AECP v6.3 hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) product has tier-1 all-flash performance.

AECP is built on Arcfra Cloud Operating System (ACOS) with modular components such as the Arcfra Virtualization Engine (AVE), Arcfra Network Storage (ABS), and Arcfra Kubernetes Engine. V6.3 AECP delivers 11M+ IOPS, 130+ GiB/s, and <100 μs latency on a 3-node cluster. 

This is powerful software. Where did it come from? We looked at Arcfra’s history and found out it was started up in May, 2024. It puzzled us as to how, in just 23 months, Arcfra could produce such a broad and performant HCI software portfolio. 

A few days later Arcfra announced that, in its first 2026 quarter, it launched Neutree, an open-source, AI Model-as-a-Service (MaaS)-ready platform. This “brings together model management, inference services, and operational workflows to make enterprise AI more deployable, manageable, and scalable in real-world environments.”

The Arcfra website lists even more products: Arcfra Block Storage, Arcfra File Storage, Arcfra Backup and Recovery. Just how has it managed to produce all this software in less than 2 years? 

Its co-founder, CEO Wenhao Xu, was previously the co-founder and board chairman of Chinese HCI company SmartX (Beijing Zhiling Haina Technology Co., Ltd.), from 2013 to 2024, and a software engineer at Oracle-acquired Nimbula in Mountain View from 2011 to 2012. The other founders included Leo Wang and Hongyi Wang, the COO.

SmartX is well-established and has more than 1,500 customers in China. Hongyi Wang was also previously a co-founder, and COO, of SmartX. 

We understand that, in 2024, in a spin-out type deal, Arcfra, meaning Xu and the two Wangs, bought the global (outside China) business and product IP of SmartX, which included its full-stack HCI offering, the SmartX ECP Enterprise Cloud Platform (which uses the KVM hypervisor). We believe Arcfra’s AECP and ACOS are direct evolutions of this SmartX software. 

SmartX continues to operate inside China with Arcfra focusing outside China, mainly on the Asia-Pacific region, offering customers there a VMware alternative competing with Nutanix, Proxmox, Oracle Virtualization and Scale Computing.

Its customers include Foxconn, the Cafe24 and ConnectWave e-commerce platforms plus banks, insurance companies and more. You can check out Foxconn, Cafe24 and ConnectWave case studies here. 

Arcfra is expanding into Europe and America. View it as a serious up and coming VMware alternative with decent enterprise credentials. Check out its blogs to get a flavour of the company’s capabilities.