More enterprise and midmarket organisations are adopting hyper-converged infrastructure to reduce data centre costs and improve operational efficiency.
This is according to a SimpliVity 2016 State of hyperconverged Infrastructure Market Report which found the use cases for deploying hyper-converged infrastructure are becoming more diverse as the technology is supporting more tier-one and mission-critical workloads.
Cost reduction, operational efficiency and data recovery capabilities were listed as the top two drivers for hyper-converged adoption by global organisations.
The report surveyed over 1 000 IT professionals globally and assessed the top IT infrastructure challenges organisations are facing, and how hyper-converged infrastructure addresses these challenges.
Based on responses, 42% of those planning to adopt hyper-converged infrastructure ranked operational efficiency as their top IT priority. Organisations also want to improve their disaster recovery and data backup/recovery capabilities, evidenced by these IT priorities being ranked numbers two and three, respectively.
Marianne Budnik, CMO at SimpliVity, says the report is clear - the hyper-converged infrastructure market has dramatically grown over the last year.
"With the large number of organisations planning to adopt hyper-converged infrastructure within the next two years, that growth is accelerating. We believe this report signals that we've reached an important inflection point in the market.
"Hyper-converged infrastructure adoption is moving beyond single-system use cases to support all IT services and applications, including business and mission-critical, for organisations around the globe," explains Budnik.
The survey revealed EMEA is ahead of the curve in adopting hyper-converged infrastructure.
"Although EMEA organisations are lagging slightly in virtualising servers, with only 48% of EMEA organisations, however, more than 60% are virtualised compared to 58% for all respondents worldwide. This means the region is ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to adoption of hyper-converged infrastructure," says the report.
Anton Jacobsz, MD at Networks Unlimited, says hyper-convergence allows for easier management of the virtual environment for local organisations.
"Adoption of hyper-convergence is increasing at a steady pace in the South African market; more and more companies are looking at a hyper-converged strategy to reduce the complexity and costs in their data centre.
"The study found 88% of those with plans to adopt hyper-converged infrastructure are planning to do so within the next one to two years, a 15% increase from 2015 results, indicating that adoption is accelerating," he points out.
In May, Gartner forecasted the market for hyper-converged integrated systems (HCIS) will grow 79% to reach almost $2 billion in 2016, propelling it toward mainstream use in the next five years.
HCIS will be the fastest-growing segment of the overall market for integrated systems, reaching almost $5 billion, which is 24% of the market, by 2019, says the report.
Andrew Butler, vice president and analyst at Gartner, says the integrated systems market is starting to mature, with more users upgrading and extending their initial deployments.
"We are on the cusp of a third phase of integrated systems; this evolution presents IT infrastructure and operations leaders with a framework to evolve their implementations and architectures."
According to Wikibon, converged infrastructure is a trend that has been growing for over five years and is rapidly transforming the way users consume IT.
"While converged infrastructure is available from most enterprise vendors today, the top providers over the last few years have been Oracle (with a full end-to-end "red stack") and Cisco (which has driven a large variety of solutions with a broad ecosystem)," says Wikibon.
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