Today’s business environment is evolving into a digital ecosystem, and that ecosystem must support a very digital user. What’s fascinating is the pace and acceleration of this evolution. Mobility, the Internet of Things and the growth of cloud are all impacting services--and entire go-to-market strategies. Through it all, companies need their technology to keep up with evolving consumer and business demands.
It’s for these reasons that the days of the massive data center build-outs are quickly coming to an end. Organizations need a new way to unify key resources to deliver more applications, desktops, data and user content. Furthermore, organizations need their data centers to run more efficiently, operate with a reduced overall footprint and support emerging digital business initiatives.
All of this brings us to next-generation converged architecture. In the past, convergence was fairly basic, with minimal management or virtualization involved. It was basically a collection of hardware resources, rather than complex individual components making up a better whole. Today’s converged infrastructure (CI) solutions are smarter, smaller and much more efficient than anything we have seen in the past. They also have direct integration with virtualization and cloud solutions.
Indeed, there are big benefits to CI, and we are seeing an adoption boom. According to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, the worldwide converged systems market increased revenue 8.5% year over year, to $3.1 billion during the fourth quarter of 2015. The market generated 1,547 petabytes of new storage capacity shipments during the quarter, up 26.9% compared to the same period a year ago. For the full year of 2015, worldwide converged systems market revenue increased 8.3%, to $10.6 billion, when compared to 2014.
"We are seeing some of the market demand move into deals with lower average selling prices, which is driving a shift from traditional converged systems to hyperconverged systems," said Kevin M. Permenter, senior research analyst, Enterprise Servers. "Right now, most of the growth is coming from the mid-market, which is heavily skewed toward hyperconverged systems. We are expecting to see this trend continue into the near term."
It’s important to understand exactly why the world is turning to converged infrastructure as a go-to solution for their next-gen data center. Consider this:
CI helps create the bridge into digitization. With so many new connections coming into the data center, there must be architecture in place that can support it all--and scale. CI allows for greater levels of multi-tenancy while still reducing overall data center real estate requirements. In addition, these solutions integrate with virtualization systems to support powerful application and desktop delivery strategies. Moving forward, CI will enable greater levels of digitization by supporting more interconnected devices in the data center.
CI better supports quickly changing business strategies. The ability to scale and grow quickly is a big part of supporting evolving organizational goals. Converged systems scale as building blocks of the business. This means that onboarding of new users, divisions or even entire businesses can be done quickly and efficiently. Furthermore, integration with virtualization solutions and management helps create an architecture that scales both physical and virtual components. Finally, these systems will help scale on-premise resources and integrate with specific cloud services.
New cost economics are achieved with CI. Remember, you’re not only impacting the data center here; you’re also helping create better business economics. IT is quickly becoming a more service-driven organization as the data center becomes more turnkey. Businesses are now seeing IT as a consumption model that directly integrates with the organization’s strategies. Not only does CI help create better data center economics, it fundamentally helps the business run more efficiently. When IT acts as a direct business enabler, you experience better user productivity, improved technology cost structures and a greater ability to execute on business strategies.
Moving forward, solutions around CI will be the building blocks of the next-generation business. The ability to quickly pivot based on market trends is critical to maintaining a competitive advantage. Organizations will need to clearly identify their business and IT strategies to see how the data center can support these goals. In working with CI, you create the level of flexibility and scalability needed to grow in a digital world.
Underwritten by HPE
Part of HPE’s Power of One strategy, HPE Converged Architecture 700 delivers infrastructure as one integrated stack. HPE Converged Architecture 700 delivers proven, repeatable building blocks of infrastructure maintained by one management platform (HPE OneView), built and delivered exclusively by qualified HPE Channel Partners. This methodology saves considerable time and resources, compared to the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach.
Based on a complete HPE stack consisting of HPE BladeSystem with Intel® Xeon® E5 v3-based HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen9 blades, HPE 3PAR StoreServ all-flash storage, HPE Networking, and HPE OneView infrastructure management software, the HPE Converged Architecture 700 can be easily modified to fit within your existing IT environment.