Hyperconverged Systems Adoption and Growth in 2019

While the hyperconverged market didn't see as much M&A deal activity in 2018 as it did in 2017, there were still a lot of developments, with a focus on the shift to software models and the use of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) in hybrid cloud environments. Here are four predictions for hyperconverged growth in 2019:

1. Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Adds SDS Capabilities

It's easy to confuse Software Defined Storage (SDS) with Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), even though from a manageability standpoint the two are quite different.

Software-defined storage (SDS) resources are managed independently of compute resources, especially in virtualized and containerized environments. Software-defined storage (SDS) shows the LUNs, volumes, or files that need to be mapped to the associated virtual machines or containers.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is more than just storage. It is still software-defined infrastructure like software-defined storage (SDS), but it is designed around the compute fabric, not the storage fabric. With hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), everything is managed at the compute level, whether it's virtual machines or containers. There are no LUNs, volumes or files to be managed separately. That said, the challenge with hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is that virtualization software can limit the number of nodes in a cluster. As a result, in many cases, customers need to deploy two different software-defined solutions for different use cases where a single software-defined infrastructure would be ideal.

While software-defined storage (SDS) cannot be used as a true hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) because it is a traditional storage management structure, experts predict that hyper-converged infrastructures (HCIs) will add software-defined storage (SDS) functionality in 2019 in order to bypass the cluster size limitations imposed by virtualization software. By dividing servers into "application servers" (servers with application VMs, virtualization software, and possibly storage) and "data servers" (storage-only servers), the same hyper-converged infrastructure ("HCI") software can be used under the same management framework. HCI) software can scale to 1,000 servers in the same cluster. This enables organizations to adopt a single vendor's services for both hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and software-defined storage (SDS) use cases, while still retaining the value of each solution.

2. Hybrid Cloud Becomes Truly Hybrid

Today's Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is not really suited to a hybrid cloud strategy because it essentially takes the native Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) software stack and just puts it on bare metal servers in a public **** cloud. While the goal of using the same management framework in both the local deployment and the public **** cloud is understandable, this model eliminates much of the value of the public **** cloud.

For example, what if the organization wants to use some of the great cloud-native analytics apps that are only available in the public **** cloud? And if the organization just adds a native hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software stack to bare-metal servers in the cloud, then the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software stack is not taking advantage of the rich functionality that is available in the public *** cloud.

This new hybrid cloud model also provides immediate availability of enterprise application data in the public **** cloud. However, recovery in the public **** cloud can be achieved with near-synchronized recovery points and 5 9 availability before it takes days to weeks to recover data from the public **** cloud to a local deployment.

In both use cases, replication in the public **** cloud takes up the least amount of space, so organizations don't incur the cost of keeping their entire local software stack in the public **** cloud.

The experts' prediction is that in 2019, one will begin to see a different approach with hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) vendors, by leveraging native hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) tools known to the IT team, while leveraging cloud-native services that are better suited to a hybrid cloud strategy as well as to the apps that make the public **** cloud a reality.

3. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) evolves into abstract converged infrastructure (ACI)

Like virtualization, containerization is really just another form of abstraction. Containers are lighter and more portable than VMs, but the abstraction applications and operating systems come from hardware. While organizations will always have separate infrastructures for containers and VMs, most organizations prefer a single infrastructure.

The hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) value proposition of reducing IT infrastructure complexity is more attractive for containerization because the goal from a DevOps perspective is to minimize IT interactions. As a result, it is difficult to use traditional storage and SDS (software-defined storage) for containerization because it still requires storage management and some form of storage knowledge.

In some cases, containers are deployed in virtual machines, and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is certainly a good solution for this model. However, in order to truly leverage containerization and container orchestration frameworks, the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) should itself support both types of abstractions, containerization and virtualization.

For all these reasons, the growth of containerization and the long tail of virtualization will turn hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) into abstract converged infrastructure or abstract converged infrastructure (ACI). The expert expectation is that people will see the first implementation of Abstract Converged Infrastructure (ACI) in 2019.

4. "HCI Software" Continues to Mislead

Much of the industry talks about a software approach to hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), but most of the appliance vendors that have introduced a software approach have done so for a variety of wrong reasons. A software approach to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) should primarily provide benefits to customers. However, the primary reason most equipment vendors are adopting a software approach is to benefit themselves by moving from the hardware business category to the software business category and increasing gross margins (rather than benefiting their customers). Although the software they promote is essentially an application "in the name of software," hyper-converged appliance vendors will continue to spread the software message to please financial analysts.

By taking a true software approach to hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), customers can install the software on any vendor's existing servers and convert it to production, rather than just using it for trials or proof of concept. Customers can also mix and match new and existing servers, different brands of servers and different models of servers. Customers can also purchase software that is pre-configured on new servers and deploy that software alongside software installed on existing servers.

A true software approach will also offer the option of perpetual or term licenses, which is important when storage is in a server refresh cycle. With a perpetual license, the customer owns the license for life, so they can move it to a new server during the server refresh cycle without having to pay for a license every year or every time they refresh the device.

Finally, the software approach provides the most flexibility when adding capacity because customers can add drives to servers or replace lower capacity drives in servers with higher capacity drives. Obviously, customers can add entire servers as if they were devices.

Experts expect hyper-converged appliance vendors to continue to maintain a vague definition of software in 2019 and will not offer potential customers all the benefits of a true software approach as hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software vendors do.