Hyperconverged Infrastructure
HCI adoption has been on the rise in both the Indian and global markets. According to IDC Enterprise storage systems tracker, there have been a number of reasons for this. For one, HCI is the best suited architecture for both hybrid and multi cloud.Other contributory factors are simplified DevOps, micro services, containers and the Wave 2 adoption for business critical applications on HCI. We are also witnessing a complete data center migration from Tier 3 to HCI
Amit Mehta, Director of Modern Data Center Business at Dell Technologies, is gung ho about HCI and has claimed market leadership of HCI on the hardware side. He said, “It has become clear after Q1 of 2019 that globally we are the number 1 market leader in HCI. Globally we are now 32.3%. We have got our portfolio right across the spectrum. Now specific to India, year on year growth of the external storage market is about 23%. Quarter on quarter is about 25%. The Indian external storage market has grown on the back of all the big initiatives taken across BFSI, telco, government and the e-commerce verticals.”
“Within that the HCI market has had a far better run. It used to be one-third of the market about a year back. This is now 56%, likely to become 70-75% in the next few years. Just looking at the Q1 of 2019, year on year it has seen a 94% growth and quarter on quarter it has been 41%. This is the India story.”
While talking about the HCI, Mehta said, “Fundamentally what this is telling you is that customers are moving towards a bi-centric approach to building IT where they are moving towards a software centric control of the network storage and compute and collapsing the traditional architecture in hyper converged.”
IDC is projecting the India external storage market with a stagger of about 6% till 2023, which they upped from 4.3% from last quarter. The stagger for the HCI market is about 37.1%. Worldwide the HCI market is growing at about 20%, APJ at about
The IDC Tracker results send a very clear message: India is embracing hybrid cloud to build its future digital economy and is trusting Nutanix to help do it
32%, but the India HCI is 37.1. So India is adopting HCI in a great way.
Added Mr Mehta, “People are realizing that is order to implement their digital transformation goals, they need to accelerate the IT transformation journey and for that hybrid cloud is very critical. Customers who use hybrid cloud, they can release applications 10x faster, they can achieve their business goals 3x faster. One thing that is driving HCI is that it is best suited to both hybrid and multi-cloud architecture.”
According to IDC research, large enterprises are having 2-3 clouds in their environment. Managing multicloud is a big area. HCI delivers business outcomes on a cloud operating model and that can be both on frame and off frame.
Mr Mehta also talked about DevOps, “People moved from monolithic architectures of software development to merged micro services based environments and containerized applications. The primary driver there is how quickly they can move from core to production, how quickly they can release apps to be able to deliver great customer experiences and generate revenue.”
“Then there are business critical applications. People are increasingly looking at work loads and realizing that all of them are not equal and cloud is not necessarily the strategy to go with. Rather than only BDI, people having started implementing mixed workloads. That’s also driving HCI. Fourthly, we are in the final stage of data centre migration and data centre consolidation. So hyper-convergence gives large organizations a chance to reduce their floor space and cooling requirements.”
“The global and Indian HCI trends are similar but India appears to be ahead of the curve because it doesn’t have the same legacy. Also, the India data rates are the cheapest. Some of the telecom revolution and digital transformation trends are there due to no legacy and that’s why we are ahead of the adoption curve. Indians are also the ones who are transforming whether it is ITES or large IT companies they are transforming global companies, so they are embracing this trend faster.”
Mr Mehta said that the government was also a key player in HCI, “The government has also become a very emphatic player off late. There has been a push on data centres thanks to all these different schemes that the government is releasing. They are adopting cloud and pushing their departments to adopt cloud via MeitY approved vendors. After that there are disaster recovery centres which are based on HCI architecture. They are leveraging hybrid cloud. They are using Azure Stack, a hyper-converged infrastructure. NIC is a big adopter.”
Nutanix meanwhile claimed leadership in the software side of HCI, quoting the IDC WW Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, 2019Q1, which ranked Nutanix top Software HCI vendor with a 43.3 percent share of Hyperconverged Systems Based on Owner of HCI Software in India in 2019Q1.
Said Balakrishnan Anantharaman, Vice President and Managing Director of Sales for India and SAARC, Nutanix,“The IDC Tracker results send a very clear message: India is embracing hybrid cloud to build its future digital economy and is trusting Nutanix to help do it.”
Added Trideeb Roy, Head, Data Center Sales, Cisco India, “Our Cisco Global Cloud Index (GCI) indicates that given the surge in demand, Cloud will represent 95% of all data center traffic by 2021, which will be further spurred on in India with data localisation laws. Cisco Hyperflex is the platform for any application in any cloud at any scale. Although the market for hyperconverged infrastructure is at the early stages of its life cycle, it’s becoming increasingly clear that these scale-out and feature-rich HCI systems are driving real capex and opex benefits within datacentres around the world.”
“The Cisco Hyperflex is an integrated system for compute, network and storage that enables customers with a competitive advantage by delivering immediate benefits to traditional data center workloads, simplified multicloud operations, and a platform for core to edge computing, all the while serving as a future-ready platform for the technology changes ahead. This technology platform allows our customers the freedom to innovate and build their businesses for a digitally transformed world.”