The buzz of buzz words around converged infrastructure (CI) sound familiar enough, scalable, efficient, manageable, faster, flexible, but there are other benefits that are perhaps not as obvious or well known.
Not only can CI bestow a flexibility and fluidity to your enterprise architectures, it can also serve as a platform on which to become more cloud compliant, allowing easier usage of, or indeed transition to, public cloud services.
The greater levels of integration and manageability of CI also combine to bring greater resilience in infrastructure, as the node-based approach allows easy load sharing and redundancy, as well as easy replacement with minimal configuration requirements.
However, there are concerns as the mix of technology is new and its integration with existing architectures, services and practices requires quite a significant assessment and a deep knowledge of what is already in place before adding CI.
That said, demand is strong and appears to be coming from many quarters.
“It’s early days for the Irish market but for engineered systems (e.g. Oracle, IBM),” according to Chris Davey, architecture lead for Accenture Ireland.
Pull and push
“We are seeing limited “pull” from customers, but the “push” from vendors is strong in the large enterprise systems space, with vendors discounting to establish presence and market share. The capacity of these platforms is so large, that in Ireland these devices are most suitable for large local organisations, or organisations with a global presence.”
“To date,” said Davey, “we are seeing more interest in the engineered systems than Nutanix-style converged infrastructure. What we are hearing from clients is that this is driven by the engineered system being a complete technology solution – infrastructure and software – from a single vendor, resulting in improved simplicity. Nutanix style infrastructure offers great potential, but is seen as a bigger change with more risk.”
Despite it being a difficult market to size, UK analyst house Ovum reckons that there is a definite swing toward CI solutions from other dense compute options.
CI impact
“The impact of CI solutions makes it a difficult market to size as it is taking spending from server, storage, and network from a hardware perspective,” said Roy Illsley, principle analyst, Ovum, “as well as the management and other software layers in some of the approaches being sold by vendors. However, Ovum considers that the majority of the movement in the hardware spending is away from blade chassis and towards converged infrastructure solutions. The data also shows that Unix and mainframe spending remains flat, and in x86 there is a continuing movement away from physical to virtual environments.”
“This shift in buying patterns will have implications for all vendors of discrete hardware technology, as the forecast demonstrates virtualisation continues to expand at a CAGR of over 13% from 2013 to 2018. The architecture of most CI solutions is based on virtualisation, and as this expands beyond just compute, x86 server virtualisation, towards both storage and networks then the converged infrastructure solutions look set to benefit from this increased spending,” Illsley reported.
Illsley said that healthcare, retail, banking were the sectors where most growth was being seen, with core customers being small to medium businesses for hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), and big CI solutions.
Ltd
