At an MES East 2016 keynote session earlier this week in Indianapolis, Katie Curtin-Mestre, vice president of product and content marketing, discussed the surge in hyper-convergence. The market is growing rapidly, said Curtin-Mestre who cited data from market research firm IDC which shows hyper-convergence up 116 percent.
Curtin-Mestre defined hyper-converged infrastructure as: "A solution that natively collapse core storage, compute and storage networking function into a single software solution or appliance.
In addition, she showed research stating that all hyper-converged systems employ:
• A distributed file system or an object store that serves as the data organization, management, and access;
• A hypervisor that provides workload adjacency, management, and containers Asian in addition to providing the hardware abstraction layer;
• An (optional) Ethernet switch to provide scale out and or high availability capabilities.
What's driving the hyper growth of hyper-convergence is that the technology improves operational efficiency. Curtin-Mestra noted IDC's research found that 68 percent of respondents reported implementing it to reduce hardware capital expense, and another 29 percent said it reduces software capital expenses.
While Capex spending was the No. 1 value proposition, Opex budget line items are impacted across the board, including power/cooling, data center floor space, annual maintenance fees and staff.
The operational savings for Simplivity's customers have been outstanding, concluded Curtain-Mestre. Less money is being spent on remediation and patching, and many clients report using the budget savings to drive innovation at their companies.
Rather than having to focus on fixing and monitoring, IT professionals can be builders. Prior to deploying Simplivity solutions, IT departments were spending 19 percent of budgets on innovation and new projects. After implementation, those customers reported spending 29 percent of their spending on work that is driving business forward, Simplivity reported.
