As customers seek alternatives to traditional server and storage architectures during infrastructure refreshes, hyper-converged platforms are becoming a popular choice for modern workload deployment.
As a result, Technology Business Research's (TBR) 1Q16 Hyper-converged Platforms Market Landscape research estimates a 50% compound annual growth rate for the global hyper-converged platforms market from 2015 to 2020, reaching $1.6 billion in revenue.
According to 451 Research, the vast majority of enterprises' budgets are not keeping pace with storage growth.
This has created an unsustainable storage environment that is ultimately forcing organisations to find new ways to deal with the issue beyond the storage status quo of simply adding more traditional systems and capacity, says 451 Research.
Hyper-convergence seems to have caught the imagination of the industry with an explosion of offerings that we expect to translate into meaningful adoption in 2016, it adds.
Organisations and partners are really embracing the hyper-converged message because it's simple, it's scalable from a very small customer all the way to the largest service providers, and it is a cost-effective way of deploying modern infrastructure in pursuit of a software-defined data centre, says Tom O'Reilly, VCE chief technology officer for EMEA.
"There have been some hyper-converged appliances on the market for the past few years, and almost anyone who dipped their toes in the hyper-converged water in 2013 or 2014 would tell you that today it is a much more mature environment than it was back then."
Modern business transformation goes nowhere without agile, scalable infrastructure, says Christian Perry, TBR data centre principal analyst and practice manager.
"Aging, complex IT environments are giving way to new breeds of infrastructure designed to ease deployment and management. Hyper-converged is leading this charge with ferocity."
TBR says the hyper-converged platforms market is teeming with competition from pure plays like Nutanix and Simplivity, as well as original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco.
However, as the displacement of legacy storage technologies continues, the competitive dynamic between these two camps grows more complex, particularly as hardware OEMs seek to protect their legacy install bases, notes TBR.
Hardware OEMs and niche hyper-converged vendors are partnering to efficiently and cost-effectively offer appliances and maximise flexibility for customers, it points out.
"As adoption of hyper-converged grows quickly in IT organisations of all sizes, vendors seek to meet customer demand for decreased complexity and more effective management, especially in areas with heavy storage requirements," says Krista Macomber, TBR data centre senior analyst.
Organisations' storage challenges provide opportunities for hyper-converged platforms vendors, since many hyper-converged platforms are built with a focus on improved performance and management of storage-heavy workloads, she adds.
"In turn, hardware OEMs continue to invest in hyper-converged to offset declining revenue in legacy infrastructure businesses."
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