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:
Key findings of the surveys are:
Converged and hyper-converged infrastructures are very effective choices for organizations to transform the datacenter infrastructure. Improved resource utilization and staff productivity, and increased application performance due to converged technologies, help organizations achieve their critical business and IT priorities. However, to fully reap the benefits of using converged systems, technology teams should interact with the business to fully understand the potential requirements of the future.