“The transition to a new service delivery model for IT is faced with two major obstacles which are delaying its adoption in many organisations. Firstly, enterprises are still organised in a very siloed, line-of-business (LOB) way, which has evolved by a focus on optimising internal organisation efficiency. Secondly, there is the question of how to facilitate a change in the IT delivery process that does not adversely impact the organisational structure or disrupt normal business activity. These issues are creating tensions between IT departments and functional business managers.”
“The converged infrastructure market provides CIOs with a new platform for organisations to adopt new delivery mechanisms. By encapsulating all the different hardware components in a pre-integrated solution including management, these converged infrastructure solutions effectively offer organisations a private cloud in a box. Another development is that many of these converged infrastructure solutions are designed and optimised for specific use cases such as big data analytics. Using these platforms, IT is able to deliver new services across LOB boundaries, accelerating an organisation’s ability to on-board cloud-computing principles faster than converting existing distributed components. These pre-integrated solutions tend to optimise their economic potential when shared across larger organisations and multiple functions.”
But Illsley acknowledges that basic deployment should be fairly straightforward, given the nature of the technologies.
Quick deployment
“Deployment is simplified as these products can just ‘plug and play’,” said Illsley, “however, the ability to deploy these solutions quickly and simply provides a solution to just one of the challenges. The secret sauce that makes these integrated solutions an effective approach to adopting cloud computing is the ability to fit with, and respond to, existing organisational structures and responsibilities through the use of intelligent automation technologies. As the data centre becomes more complex in terms of components, services, and technology the need to manage the delivery from an end-to-end perspective becomes critical. Therefore, any cloud in a box solution must allow IT departments not just to deploy it fast, but to manage it effectively and efficiently. Quick provisioning of new users, transparent tracking of infrastructure usage, reliable service, and real overall economic benefits must be obvious to an entire enterprise.”
Extended growth
Looking out toward the near term future, further growth is on the horizon.
“The overall market is showing growth but that growth is primarily driven by very rapid growth in the hyper-converged systems market,” Kevin M Permenter, IDC
“We expect CI solutions to grow market share, particularly in the large enterprise systems space,” said Davey. “Within the x86 space there are a wide variety of options across traditional build-your-own infrastructure to converged infrastructures providing validated, supported infrastructures to public cloud. We expect CI growth relative to traditional, while facing competition from public cloud.”
Illsley too forecasts a rosy outlook for CI, with potential for growth beyond that of certain compute options that it is displacing.
“CI or HCI is the darling of the industry,” said Illsley, “and if you remember blades were touted as the next big thing, and they have never expanded beyond the current deployment.”
“CI/HCI is different,” he argues, “in that the development of the solutions has evolved to solve specific problems like deploying VDI, and then extended to solve other vertical as well as technical issues. The biggest issue is how to integrate CI/HCI in an existing DC and IT organisation.”
“I expect the market to continue to grow,” concludes Illsley.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers