Getting around the Hyperconverged world

In today’s IT paradigm, Hyperconverged infrastructure is truly emerging as a building block for today and tomorrow’s datacenter needs.

Hyper converged solutions address the demands emerging out of third platform technologies like Cloud, Mobility, Social Business, Big Data Analytics and Digital transformation with minimal cost implications, scalability and better ease of management. For end-user organizations considering hyperconverged is becoming very relevant. The advantages of HCI over conventional multi- tier architecture are flexible IT agility; easier, more intuitive administration driven by the characteristics of autonomous storage management; and lower capital costs due to the use of commodity hardware.

In IDC’s studies, the worldwide Software Defined Storage(SDS) market is analyzed across four categories of SDS solutions namely - block, file, object, and HCI. The HCI subsegment which includes a combination of block, file, and object-based storage platforms is forecasted to lead the adoption of SDS in the market. In the Indian context, the HCI market with see a multi-fold growth in comparison to the traditional Storage Business. We expect that most of the new deployments across Customers would consider HCI deployments in their decision making.

For HCI solutions, the market offers three kinds of deployment models such as HCI appliance, Reference architectures for building a customized system and Software-only deployments. The Vendor Ecosystem for HCI has a Hardware focused and Software focused flavor. Traditional hardware vendors are promoting HCI appliance-based model for better hardware integration and ease in management and predominately speak the Hardware language and on the other hand, Software vendors are promoting software only deployments for true hyperconvergence – scalability and flexibility with DIY kits. For prospective customers and users, they should understand the messaging clearly since both the HW and SW must work seamlessly for successful deployments. It is hence, important that HCI Customer’s do not get confused with the communications from software and hardware vendors. It is also an area where Partners can play a significant role in enhancing the value of HCI solutions. Evaluation of the pros and cons for each of these deployments should be carefully done before finalizing a solution.

At a broad level, Appliance based model have fixed components of Compute, Networking and Storage, so upgrading happens thru addition of a new brick despite few components being underutilized but this is easy to deploy (Plug and play). A purely software-driven approach would deliver better utilization, scalability and flexibility on commodity hardware but requires skilled resources to manage this solution.

As per IDC, most Indian organizations are piloting HCI solutions and would enhance deployment in a phased manner which can be done by either going for an appliance-based approach or setting up small POC with standalone HCI HW and Software. Upon successful POC and testing for HCI technology they will slowly migrate to software only deployments leveraging standardized HW.

In summary, HCI deployments are becoming main stream and seeing rigorous adoption across organizations and applications. Customers need to fully understand the deployment blueprint including HW, SW and Services and reap the benefits of using hyperconverged systems. Having deployment choices helps the customer evaluate different hyperconverged deployment models to arrive at a right deployment model basis the organizations future needs.

Ranganath Sadasiva
Director, Enterprise Solutions, IDC India