Prepare for the Future with Hyperconverged Infrastructure
In their latest Voice of the Enterprise report, 451 Research highlights HCI adopters are embracing hybrid cloud, Kubernetes and edge deployments. As organizations look for secure infrastructure that is simple to manage and future ready, they are increasingly adopting HCI. HCI continues to grow in the core data center for both large (>1,000 employees) and small (<1,000 employees) organizations. In fact, of organizations that have adopted HCI, it is expected to be the most common infrastructure deployed in the data center by 2024. Read on to see how IT is using hyperconverged infrastructure to align with its future and current business strategies.
Among HCI Users, HCI Expected to Be the Majority of IT Infrastructure In Three Years
HCI adoption continues to expand into the data center. For current users, it makes up nearly half (48%) of their IT infrastructure, which is expected to grow up to 56% of the total environment by 2024. The top reasons IT organizations are turning to HCI are:
- Ease of Management (36% of respondents)
- Security (33%)
- Infrastructure Consolidation (33%)
- Operational Efficiency (32%)
VMware believes that organizations are moving away from infrastructure silos to general-purpose infrastructure that can be managed by generalists with existing tools. HCI is perceived as easy to manage because it eliminates many manual tasks by using simplified workflows and automated processes. HCI can take advantage of the latest storage technologies, such as NVMe and CSI drivers for Kubernetes-based workloads, so it can serve as a platform for both traditional and modern applications with demanding I/O profiles.
HCI is the Gateway to Hybrid IT
More than half (52%) of organizations using HCI have hybrid IT architecture in place. Meanwhile, organizations with more HCI are more likely to have hybrid IT, as the approach is in place at 66% of organizations in which HCI represents at least 51% of all their on-premises infrastructure. The presence of hybrid IT is strong across all HCI deployment locations, but it is particularly strong in core data centers (65%) and edge environments (71%).
Also, note the relationship with hybrid cloud and HCI ROI: organizations that have a positive ROI with HCI tend to have hybrid IT in place; we believe that is because HCI makes it easy to embrace hybrid cloud with consistent infrastructure and operations, which enable the seamless migration of workloads across clouds. IT can embrace the cloud for workloads when necessary and move them back as required.
HCI is exceeding expectations for hybrid IT. Although challenges (such as security complexity) do exist on the road to hybrid IT with HCI, the architecture is delivering on promises. For example, 97% of organizations say that HCI is at least meeting expectations for hybrid IT, with 41% noting that the architecture is exceeding expectations – and the more prominent the HCI deployment, the more likely HCI is exceeding expectations. Similarly, 97% of firms agree that HCI eases the process of deploying hybrid IT in their organizations, with 52% indicating they strongly agree.
Kubernetes Sees Explosive Growth on HCI
Organizations are increasingly adopting HCI for Kubernetes-orchestrated workloads. Organizations running Kubernetes on HCI jumped from 29% in 2020 to 45% in 2021, a significant increase. Many appear to be fulfilling their plans to adopt HCI from Kubernetes, and then seem to deploy it most often at edge locations. We believe these trends will continue, as HCI provides all the capabilities needed to run modern applications in a compact form factor. VMware has certified a number of vSAN ReadyNodes purpose-built for edge deployments that include features such as ruggedized servers with alternative mounting options and the ability to use alternative networking options.
Why We Believe Customers Choose vSAN When Choosing HCI
vSAN Provides a Seamless Path to Hybrid Cloud. VMware uniquely provides consistent, centralized management of all your HCI deployments from edge to the core data center to public cloud with the same tools you already use, the vSphere Client and vCenter. No need to learn new tools. No re-factoring or re-writing of your applications is required. You can easily extend VMware HCI to all the global hyperscalers as well as hundreds of regional public cloud providers.
vSAN is Developer Ready. VMware vSAN enables storage management of modern and traditional apps on a single platform with the same tools and skillsets. Highlights of the past several releases include:
- The availability of Cloudian HyperStore and MinIO Object Storage on the vSAN Data Persistence platform, empowering efficient consumption of S3-compatible object storage on VMware HCI for your AI/ML and Kubernetes-based workloads
- Dynamic provisioning and non-disruptive resizing of persistent volumes for your stateful apps, with support for vSphere with Tanzu and all vanilla Kubernetes distributions
- Granular monitoring of Kubernetes objects in vCenter with health and compliance information on a container volume basis. Troubleshooting is made simple as IT admins and developers now talk in the same language.
Next Steps
Read about vSAN 7 Update 2, the latest release, or watch the vSAN 7 Update 2 Overview video.
See how Cloud Native Storage in vSphere and vSAN powers modern applications
Come learn about VMware’s vision for storage and data in a multi-cloud world at VMworld.
Source for all charts and information in this blog: 451 Research, Part of S&P Global Market Intelligence: Voice of the Enterprise: Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Strategy and Workloads 2021. September 2021
