“This ‘verticalisation’ is an attempt to extend to the mid-market,” he said.
Business in a box
In terms of the breakdown of converged solutions being sold, Illsley said that the fastest growing sector is hyper-converged, which is being used to develop and deliver appliance-based solutions for verticals and workloads, such as ‘hospital in a box’.
“The vendors are producing new focused appliances for mid-market and medium scale deployments, but at the top end it is either a blue print (ref architecture) or an engineered system.”
Oracle has a clear focus on providing a range of high-end systems that deliver excellent scalability with reliability and performance, said Illsley. The main differentiating aspect is that Oracle’s Engineered Systems redefine the traditional boundaries of infrastructure components (compute, network, storage) by also reaching further up the technology stack into the database and middleware to optimally run the customer’s application software that lies at the heart of the enterprise.
Looking at the definitions, analyst IDC defines converged systems as pre-integrated, vendor-certified systems containing server hardware, disk storage systems, networking equipment, and basic element/systems management software. Systems not sold with all four of these components are not regarded by analyst as being within the CI frame.
IDC reports that worldwide converged systems revenue increased 6.2% year over year in the third quarter of 2015, surpassing $2.5 billion (€2.3 billion) in value.
“The overall market is showing growth but that growth is primarily driven by very rapid growth in the hyper-converged systems market,” said Kevin M Permenter, senior research analyst, enterprise servers, IDC. “Smaller and more flexible systems, like the ones found in the hyper-converged space, were well positioned to take advantage of the burgeoning mid-market customer segment this quarter.”
Three segments
The analyst makes three distinctions in the market segments, integrated systems, certified reference systems, and hyper-converged systems.
Integrated systems, says IDC, are pre-integrated, vendor-certified systems containing server hardware, disk storage systems, networking equipment, and basic element/systems management software. The certified reference systems are pre-integrated, vendor-certified systems containing server hardware, disk storage systems, networking equipment, and basic element/systems management software. Certified reference systems, however, are designed with systems from multiple technology vendors. The hyper-converged systems collapse core storage and compute functionality into a single, highly virtualised solution. A key characteristic of hyper-converged systems that differentiate these solutions from other integrated systems is their ability to provide all compute and storage functions through the same server-based resources.
IDC lists the top three integrated systems vendors (Q3 2015) in order VCE, HP and Oracle, with market shares of 28%, 22% and 21% respectively, with others accounting for 29%.
For certified reference systems, IDC lists Cisco/NetApp, EMC and Hitachi as the top three, with 45%, 33% and 11% respectively.
With such obviously strong market figures and demand, it is clear that most organisations are deploying CI technologies alongside existing IT infrastructure. So how have the they been on this integration path?
Davey thinks it should not present much of a problem.
Straightforward integration
“It’s early days to call this in Ireland,” said Davey. “Overall, integration of these devices should be straightforward. However, initially these devices are a new technology for most organisations, potentially requiring new skills. Gaining the full business benefit requires a business case over the full lifetime of the system, and careful management to deliver against this, so I think we’ll see greater take up as time goes on.”
Taking a higher level view, Illsley said that there are notable stumbling blocks for adoption and integration.
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