Hyperconverged infrastructure adoption is accelerating

The hyperconverged infrastructure is increasingly being adopted by enterprise and midmarket companies to reduce data center costs and improve operational efficiency, according to a new report by ActualTech Media.

The use cases for deploying hyperconverged infrastructure are becoming more diverse as the technology is supporting more tier-one and mission-critical workloads.

Using hyperconverged infrastructure for mission-critical workloads

The 2016 global report surveyed over 1,000 IT professionals and assessed the top IT infrastructure challenges organizations are facing, and how hyperconverged infrastructure addresses these challenges. Cost reduction and operational efficiency were common themes for survey respondents, and were listed as the top two drivers for hyperconverged adoption.

Key takeaways from the global report include:

• Reduced costs is the top benefit expected by planned adopters and the top benefit realized by current adopters, and improved operational efficiency ranked in the top three for both current and planned adopters.
• Forty-two percent (42%) of those planning to adopt hyperconverged infrastructure rank operational efficiency as their top IT priority.
• Organizations want to improve their disaster recovery and data backup/recovery capabilities, evidenced by these IT priorities being ranked numbers two and three, respectively, for those interested in deploying hyperconverged infrastructure.
• Adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure almost doubled in the midmarket, with a year-over-year increase of eighty percent (80%).
• Eighty-eight percent (88%) of those with plans to adopt hyperconverged infrastructure are planning to do so within the next one to two years—a 15% increase over 2015 results, indicating that adoption is accelerating.

EMEA is ahead of the curve in adopting hyperconverged infrastructure

The survey found that although EMEA organizations are lagging slightly in virtualizing servers, with only forty-eight percent (48%) of EMEA organizations more than sixty percent (60%) virtualized compared to fifty-eight percent (58%) for all respondents worldwide, they are ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure.

The increased interest in hyperconverged infrastructure may be a result of companies’ revitalized focus on server virtualization, as this ranked in the top three IT priorities in the survey. Operational efficiency and cost savings were again major drivers among planned adopters for EMEA respondents. Key findings from the report include:

• Adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure in EMEA jumped from twenty-seven percent (27%) in 2015 to forty-six percent (46%) in 2016 – a seventy percent (70%) increase.
• Improving operational efficiency, improving data backup/recovery, and increasing server virtualization are the top three IT priorities for EMEA organizations that are planning to adopt hyperconverged infrastructure.
• Cost/ROI and scalability are the top criteria for evaluating hyperconverged solutions for planned adopters and current adopters, indicating that organizations are focused on ensuring they are making the most of IT investments.