- Gartner introduced its first-ever magic quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure.
- IT teams embracing HCI, are looking for new and better ways to use it in order to drive core business initiatives like digital transformation.
- New and expanding use cases include edge computing, hybrid cloud / multi-cloud, and secondary storage among others.
At the end of last year, Gartner released its magic quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI). The magic quadrant is the research and advisory firm’s signature pictorial representation of technology markets.
Gartner had never published a magic quadrant for HCI before. However, as the company states, by 2022 some 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside of traditional, centralized data centers or the Cloud. This is a significant jump up from 2018, where less than 10% of data was handled through HCI. The projected rocket-ship-like trajectory for Hyperconverged Infrastructure seems the clear reason for the new analysis.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure Growth Path
In legacy infrastructure models, when an organization wants to deploy a new application, the IT team configures the various infrastructure components. These pieces may include the Ethernet network, storage, firewalls, the compute environment and more. Each of these pieces needs to be reviewed and configured separately to enable the deployment of the new application. This siloed structure leads to a higher probability of error in configuration, higher cost, and longer deployment times.
Hyperconverged solutions combine computation, networking, and storage resources into an easy-to-use system that brings speed and efficiency to an IT organization. It also enables rapid deployment of new services and applications and carries the benefits of shared resource pools. Hyperconvergence goes far beyond servers and storage, by including things like dedicated storage arrays, deduplication, and data protection. While many will argue that HCI makes legacy infrastructure obsolete, others suggest that the expected has not met the reality.
[Read: The Evolution of Convergence Whitepaper]
New Use Cases for Hyperconvergence
No matter where you come down on hyperconverged infrastructure, it’s clear that the market continues to evolve. The industry regularly introduces new deployment options. Depending on the needs and culture of an organization, implementations swings from hyperconverged appliances to HCI software to models that deliver it as a cloud service.
IT teams that have embraced the advantages of HCI are looking for new ways to use it to drive core business initiatives like digital transformation. The desire to deploy the architecture this way has resulted in a more varied set of use cases within organizations than the original niche areas it was created to address. Gartner echoes this with evidence from its analysis of social media conversations about HCI. Here are a few of the areas that popped during that information gathering:
Remote Office / Branch Office (ROBO). While other use cases have traditionally been industry drivers, the market direction is shifting toward enabling remote and branch offices (ROBOs) and network-edge locations. With today’s current trend towards remote and satellite offices, using a hyperconverged infrastructure holds tremendous advantages. One central portal can remotely manage the data center. Remote management helps to limit capital expenditures and simplify both hardware and software management at remote offices. Cisco HyperFlex for HyperFlex Edge (for ROBOs) is one example of leading players getting into this arena.
Hybrid Cloud. Hybrid cloud enablement has for a long time been the primary conversation surrounding HCI. While that’s waned a bit, as businesses continue to discover the advantages of hybrid solutions, it remains relevant. Most organizations don’t want to put all their workloads into the Cloud. There’s potential to add risk, particularly in sensitive industries like finance and healthcare. In contrast, an HCI-powered hybrid cloud gives IT more flexibility. They can move applications and workloads to and from public clouds with a common platform and set of tools. HCI-powered hybrid or multi-cloud deployments have also become popular as backup targets or disaster recovery options.
Secondary Storage. Software defines storage in a hyperconverged infrastructure. Each storage node acts as a redundant part of the storage pool. If one node goes down, the rest will remain unaffected. This design eliminates the need for storage area networks (SANs). Software manages the manner and location of data storage. Because of this, HCI can be less costly to operate than traditional infrastructure. Companies including DataCore, HPE, and Huawei have all delved heavily into this arena.
Even More Use Cases
Hyperconverged infrastructures will continue to grow in popularity. As the industry players in Gartner’s magic quadrant acquire startups, further innovate, and bundle their hardware with HCI software suppliers, even more use cases will arise. For instance, Gartner also referenced AI operations and encryption as two of those areas to keep an eye on.
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