03-Apr-2019 01:09 PM
Posted by Prashanth GJ, CEO, Technobind
Data
centers, over the years, have gone through colossal transformations. Companies
are investing billions of dollars on modernizing their infrastructure to meet
the emerging needs. While all of this has resulted in more robust and
comprehensive environments, one inevitable outcome was increasing complexities
and cost.
In
this last few years, we have seen how Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) has
transpired as a preferred option to navigate these challenges. HCI marked a
shift from the legacy hardware-defined systems to a more flexible, scalable and
intelligent software-defined infrastructure.
As we step into another critical financial year, I think data center and HCI will remain strategic areas of investment for organizations. Globally, the HCI market size is expected to reach USD 17.1 billion by 2023, growing at an impressive CAGR of more than 30 percent.
What’s changing?
HCI
is touted as the most effective solution to simplify data center operations
today. However, many organizations, over a period of time have come to realize
that HCI doesn’t always offer the kind of cost efficiencies it initially
promises—especially the pre-integrated hardware and software bundle delivered
as branded appliances.
This
model, in which the customer buys a pre-built ‘black box’, significantly limits
the user’s choice and to a large extent, the cost savings associated with the
hardware component. The hardware that comes with such out-of-box solutions are
not always the best suitable or cost-effective option for many organizations.
It also limits the organization’s ability to leverage existing infrastructure
and investments and forces them to pay again for both hardware and software at
the time of HCI refresh.
Quite
clearly, customers are now rethinking - why are we paying a premium for the
hardware, in a completely software-defined model? And why are we getting into
another vicious cycle of vendor lock-in? These are questions that will steer a clear
shift in customers’ buying decisions in the next one year.
Software-only HCI solutions are increasingly becoming a great alternative here. It allows customers to choose the most suitable and cost-effective hardware for their HCI deployments. This ‘bring your own hardware’ model is going to be a potential gamechanger in the HCI market.
Great partner play
A Gartner analyst recently stated that data centers will be dead soon, emphasizing that 80 percent of enterprises will have shut down their traditional data centers by 2025. Many industry experts came forward to challenge the statement and said why data centers will continue to be of great value.
I think, data centers will not cease to exist, rather they would get smarter, efficient and smaller—thanks to new innovations on the hardware and software fronts.
In
fact, I would call this the comeback of hardware to the data centres. Because
hardware will provide the critical differentiator, offering huge cost savings
and eliminating complexities.
If
you go by statistics, the Indian data center market is expected to reach values
of approximately $4 billion by 2024, growing at a healthy rate of close to 10
percent.
This
is why we are highly optimistic about our recent partnership with Supermicro,
the global leader in in enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions and
green computing technology. Companies will gradually shift to the ‘soft
appliance’ model and the hardware will once again become the deal maker for
partners.
The ability to offer the right hardware for
today’s critical HCI deployments will open up new doors of opportunity for
solution providers. Not just that, greater adoption of AI, IoT and big data
will further fuel the need for compute-intensive solutions in the data center.
And hardware will continue to play a critical role going forward.