Converged and hyper-converged infrastructure are being considered as possible solutions to the challenges organizations are facing today

Technology is fast becoming the key pillar for organizations to stay competitive, spur innovations, and seize new growth opportunities. Despite increasing IT budgets, the traditional three-tier architecture, is proving to be a hindrance to meeting the rising business and market demands due to its inbuilt complexities. Apart from that, the stress to reduce operational costs and improve productivity is also forcing technology teams to explore alternative means to bring down complexity and costs through the adoption of agile architectures.

The IT staff spend a substantial part of their time doing mundane activities such as provisioning, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Progressive technology teams are assessing and eyeing for new technologies to streamline infrastructure management with the fewest possible integration challenges to free up the IT staff's time for truly value-adding initiatives.

Converged and hyper-converged infrastructure are being considered as possible solutions to the challenges organizations are facing today. These technologies are simple to deploy and manage, integrate with prevailing infrastructure seamlessly, and also have the benefit of lower operational cost than traditional three-tier architecture. Owing to these, hyper-converged technologies are gaining traction across verticals.

In India, hyper-converged infrastructure systems have attracted the largest amount of interest in the converged systems portfolio. We will see companies consolidating their services to offer a complete virtualized infrastructure on a single platform and will no longer sell micro-services, such as separate storage or backups. In 2018, more enterprises will opt for Hyper-converged infrastructure. Hyper-converged infrastructure will gain traction to address both optimization demands and removing infrastructure management complexities.

By 2019, approximately 30 percent of the global storage array capacity installed in enterprise data centers will be deployed on software-defined storage (SDS) or hyper-converged integrated system (HCIS) architectures.  Twenty percent of mission-critical applications currently deployed on three-tier IT infrastructure will transition to HCISs by 2020.

Let’s take a look at some of the forecasts for the industry in 2018.

There will be tremendous growth for the HCI industry
As per IDC, the HCI market would be growing at a CAGR of 43 percent, which is the fastest, in terms of growth rate. We now have all the top HCI vendors present in India market which will further fuel the growth of the market.The demand will come from various verticals, such as BFSI, IT & telecom, healthcare, and government sectors, among others, considering its advantages over the traditional converged infrastructure.

HCI Systems will further accelerate IT transformation
Implementing HCI as the foundation for hybrid cloud operating models will prove to be that step in the right direction to resolve infrastructure and application problems faster and be a catalyst for desired business outcomes.

Pre-configured and managed HCI services on commodity infrastructure
At a global level, this will become a highly feasible option for organizations that need to start at a smaller scale with HCI investments, without having to purchase HCI appliances or modify their existing IT environment.

Focus on building a private cloud on hyper-converged infrastructures
Customers favor building a private cloud on hyper-converged infrastructures. This trend will see traction in 2018 and we are expecting many IT giants to now focus on delivering an enterprise cloud platform.

The adoption of converged and hyper-converged infrastructure in India showed a strong growth in 2017 and is expected to accelerate in the next couple of years. Converged and hyper-converged infrastructure is very effective choices for organizations to transform the datacenter infrastructure.

Improved resource utilization and staff productivity, and increased application performance due to converged technologies, help organizations achieve their critical business and IT priorities. However, to fully reap the benefits of using converged systems, technology teams should interact with the business to fully understand the potential requirements of the future.

-- Anshuman Rai, Director Sales, Converged Platform & Solutions Division, Dell EMC.