According to IDC, the hyper-converged infrastructure, or HCI, market is currently growing at 116%, and is expected to reach $800 million by the end of 2015, and to pass $1.5 billion worldwide in 2016.
Virtualized environments have increasingly become the standard, because of its many benefits to IT departments. Who doesn’t want reduced power consumption, high-availability, and more streamlined IT deployment and support for rapid change?
Still, even in virtualized environments, IT infrastructures exist in figurative silos, with different infrastructure elements of network, storage, compute, software operating on different systems, often with difference experts.
But for many organizations the silos are disappearing. Large cloud providers, such as Amazon or Google, have developed an infrastructure model to extend the benefits of virtualization to meet their exponentially expanding IT infrastructure needs, dubbed hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI).
Converged vs. hyper-converged infrastructure
Virtually all major infrastructure companies are looking at, and developing, solutions for the converged infrastructure space. Open source analyst firm Wikibon has estimated that by 2017 nearly two-thirds of all infrastructures that supports enterprise applications will be packaged as converged solutions.
On the other hand, hyper-converged infrastructure takes the decoupling of function and hardware even further by delivering the function using software. In this software-defined approach all infrastructure components run across a mesh or fabric of low-cost hardware components turning them into a single pool from which resources can be drawn.
While hyper-converged is an exciting, up & coming technology, is it right for your business?
A great deal of confusion still exists around converged infrastructures, their benefits and challenges, and what businesses and environments for which they are well suited. We get it! At their simplest, converged infrastructure is based on blocks of hardware and hyper-converged is software-defined. But this distinction creates significant concerns that SMBs must consider.
Our recently published whitepaper “Demystifying Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: Investigating the Pros & Cons of HCI for Canadian SMBs” looks at HCI and what SMBs must consider in evaluating such solutions. If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, download the paper here.
For more information about Lanworks & our core IT solutions, contact us today!
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