The survey highlights the top 3 priorities for businesses in 2017
With the emergence of new business models and the growing digitalization of various industries, technology is fast becoming the key pillar for organizations to remain competitive, spur innovations, and capture new growth opportunities. Despite increasing IT budgets, the traditional three-tier architecture, with its inbuilt complexities, is proving to be a hindrance to meeting these rising business and market demands. The pressure to reduce operational costs and improve productivity is also driving technology teams to explore alternative means to cut down complexity and costs through the adoption of agile architectures.
To address these problems most businesses are looking for new technologies to simplify infrastructure management with the fewest possible integration challenges to free up the IT staff’s time to understand the business needs and work on innovation projects to build the competitive edge. To address the challenges organizations are facing today ,converged and hyper-converged infrastructure are being considered as the technologies that are easy to deploy and manage, integrate with existing infrastructure seamlessly, and also have a lower operational cost than traditional three-tier architecture.
IDC conducted a survey across 150 large and very large Indian organizations to understand the adoption, benefits, challenges, and buying behavior trends in converged and hyper converged infrastructure. They found out that converged infrastructure is preferred for core applications with very high IOPS and low latency requirements, especially as these appliances are pre-integrated and tested for best possible performance for specific workloads. While, hyper-converged infrastructure is being marginally preferred for perimeter workloads, which are non-core for the business. It is also being used extensively where organizations have high scale-out requirements.
According to IDC the adoption of converged and hyper-converged infrastructure in India will grow significantly as these systems can help address the following critical challenges:
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Datacenters cannot scale easily due to legacy infrastructure and the associated migration challenges. Organizations are fixing these scalability needs by adding resources but this process is getting complex.
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Organizations want a complete open environment, so that they can plug and play the required resources without any integration challenges and be more flexible to organizational needs.
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The traditional three-tier architecture, with its dependence on a shared storage resource (traditional SAN storage), acts as a bottleneck against better performance.
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Organizations are looking for better resource utilization, improved performance, scalability, and reduction in hardware footprint in datacenters.
Key findings of the surveys are:
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The top 3 IT priorities for organizations’ in 2017 are in investing in modernizing their infrastructure to improve application performance, reducing capital IT spending on infrastructure, and investing in enterprise wide management software to improve automation.
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Organizations that are using converged or hyper-converged infrastructure witnessed a huge positive impact on resource utilization, performance, scalability, and reduction in hardware footprint in datacenters.
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With the deployment of converged and hyper-converged infrastructure, organizations increased the IT staff’s productivity by reducing repetitive jobs such as monitoring and provisioning, and investing that time in innovations, trying new technologies, and collaborating internally to understand the business requirements.
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Post-deployment of converged/hyper-converged infrastructure, the time spent on provisioning was significantly reduced by 34% and that on monitoring fell by 18%. These organizations were able to invest resources in innovations (27% improvement).
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Majority of the organizations have rated performance and quality of service as the most important attributes for a converged and hyper-converged infrastructure.
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Among organizations that neither use converged technologies nor have any intentions in the future, the key barriers were concerns about higher hardware and software cost and limited scalability.
