Hyperconverged infrastructure is increasingly being adopted by enterprise and midmarket companies to reduce data center costs and improve operational efficiency, according to the results of the 2016 State of Hyperconverged Infrastructure Market Report from ActualTech Media.
The report, sponsored by SimpliVity, also noted that the use cases for deploying hyperconverged infrastructure are becoming more diverse as the technology is supporting more tier-one and mission-critical workloads.
“The report is clear – the hyperconverged infrastructure market has dramatically grown over the last year, and with the large number of organizations planning to adopt within the next two years, that growth is accelerating,” said Marianne Budnik, CMO, SimpliVity. “We believe this report signals that we’ve reached an important inflection point in the market. Hyperconverged infrastructure adoption is moving beyond single-system use cases to support all IT services and applications, including business and mission-critical, for organizations around the globe. And after signing our largest, multi-million dollar deal to date to replace all legacy IT equipment at a global Fortune 50 financial services firm, we believe that SimpliVity will lead the next wave of hyperconverged infrastructure adoption.”
Common themes
The 2016 global report surveyed over 1,000 IT professionals and assessed the top IT infrastructure challenges organizations are facing, and how hyperconverged infrastructure addresses these challenges.
Cost reduction and operational efficiency were common themes for survey respondents, and were listed as the top two drivers for hyperconverged adoption. The report also noted that hyperconverged infrastructure is being used for mixed workloads and a wider variety of use cases.
The global report also reveals that reduced costs is the top benefit expected by planned adopters and the top benefit realized by current adopters, and improved operational efficiency ranked in the top three for both current and planned adopters.
Forty-two percent (42%) of those planning to adopt hyperconverged infrastructure rank operational efficiency as their top IT priority.
Organizations want to improve their disaster recovery and data backup/recovery capabilities, evidenced by these IT priorities being ranked numbers two and three, respectively, for those interested in deploying hyperconverged infrastructure.
Adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure almost doubled in the midmarket, with a year-over-year increase of eighty percent (80%).
Eighty-eight percent (88%) of those with plans to adopt hyperconverged infrastructure are planning to do so within the next one to two years—a 15% increase over 2015 results, indicating that adoption is accelerating.
EMEA is Ahead of the Curve in Adopting Hyperconverged Infrastructure
The survey found that although EMEA organizations are lagging slightly in virtualizing servers, with only forty-eight percent (48%) of EMEA organizations more than sixty percent (60%) virtualized compared to fifty-eight percent (58%) for all respondents worldwide, they are ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure.
The increased interest in hyperconverged infrastructure may be a result of companies’ revitalized focus on server virtualization, as this ranked in the top three IT priorities in the survey. The report noted that operational efficiency and cost savings were again major drivers among planned adopters for EMEA respondents.