Hyperconverged Infrastructure Is Now A Data Center Mainstay

Hyperconverged infrastructure, where networking, compute, and storage are assembled in a commodity hardware box and virtualized together, is no longer the odd man out. Compared with converged infrastructure -- a hardware oriented combination of networking and compute -- hyperconverged brings three data center elements together in a virtualized environment.

Instead of a few converged units sitting at the edge of the corporate network, hyperconverged infrastructure has become part of the core data center infrastructure, according to 451Research's latest "Quarterly Voice of the Enterprise: Servers and Converged Infrastructure -- Organizational Dynamics."

Hyperconverged infrastructure "represents the next evolutionary step" for what passes as standard converged infrastructure, according to the report.

All major server and storage suppliers now produce hyperconverged units, but an early spin-off of EMC and VMware -- VCE -- was an early producer of what became known as Vblocks, which included Cisco servers and networking, along with EMC storage and VMware virtualization.

HPE, Dell Technologies, Nutanix, and IBM are now all producers as well.

Hyperconverged infrastructure at one time was criticized as overkill and as handing off too many configuration decisions to a single manufacturer. But IT managers and CIOs have abandoned that critique as more and more hyperconverged units are integrated into the data center with minimal configuration headaches and operational setbacks.

The 451 Research Voice of the Enterprise found that 40% of enterprises now use hyperconverged units as a standard building block in the data center, and analysts expect that number to climb rapidly over the next two years.

For that 40% of users: "74.4% of organizations currently using hyperconverged are using the solutions in their core or central datacenters, signaling this transition," according to the report.

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