HYPER CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTRE MODERNIZES IT

By Praveen Sahai, Vice President - Channels, EMC India & SAARC

Notice how the pace of business seems to accelerate every year putting them and by extension their IT departments at a disadvantage, as the latter try to keep up with the demands for additional compute, storage, performance and feature functionality? This is especially true for mid-market businesses that constantly struggle to provide agility and on-demand scale, at low costs and high reliability.

It’s no surprise then to find Indian SMBs increasingly resorting to greater usage of ICT tools in a bid to generate higher business process efficiency, achieve quality excellence, overcome business challenges and gain a competitive edge over competition, suggests an AMI’s study (2014 India SMB ICT & Cloud Services Tracker Overview). SMBs show a healthy 10%+ year-on-year rise in ICT expenditures, and their adoption of technology is likely to continue to escalate within the next few years. It therefore is no exaggeration to identify this segment as a key growth driver of the nation’s ICT usage.

Adding to already prevalent competitive pressures are trends such as mobility, computing-as-a-service, and social media that are further compounding the challenges that CIOs face and how they deliver value to the organization. For companies in the mid-market to truly leverage the benefits of ICT, conventional technology approaches may not help to deliver on the agility they are required to deliver on. To gain more flexibility to respond to these rapidly changing conditions CIOs are therefore moving towards a blended model of IT service delivery that merges internal IT capabilities with third-party services. Success under this new paradigm requires at least as much organizational innovation as technology innovation.

In order to deliver in these modern times, midmarket CIOs are looking to turn from reactive to proactive business partners, but are too preoccupied maintaining existing systems to be strategic, in addition to being resource constrained that is further preventing them from being on the latest versions and adopting the majority of new technology. This results in an inability to shift from non-differentiating “lights-on” efforts to driving strategic agility and competitive business advantage, causing a misalignment to business goals.

Hyper Converged systems speed transition to on-demand IT infrastructure

To address the current needs, mid-market CIOs need to necessarily look at hyper-converged infrastructure solutions that offer software optimization of the hardware and reduces CAPEX while delivering greater value on each unit of investment. With hyper-converged infrastructure, mid-market and enterprise companies can now focus IT resources more on innovation and strategic business value and less on keeping the lights on. Hyper-Converged Infrastructure increases operational flexibility and reduces cost. The simplicity of deployment, ongoing operation, single pane of glass management and maintenance with non-disruptive patch and update capabilities will reduce planned downtime and enhance productivity.

According to IDC, the converged infrastructure segment grew 68.5% from 2012 to a $1.4B market opportunity in 2013. This market is predicted to expand to $17.8 billion in 201612. EMC estimates the hyper-converged Infrastructure total addressable market to be between $6B and $8B for 2014 with a CAGR of 39%. The reason for this phenomenal growth is a shift in the way a growing number of customers are consuming IT. CIOs are increasingly looking for systems that are simple to manage, easy to scale, provide elasticity, don’t require advanced forecasting and deliver on the promise of software defined everything.

Some of the key pointers that CIOs can take into consideration while selecting choosing the right solution for them are:

• Look at a balance of functionality with affordability
• Consider vendors that offer best in-class service and support
• The system should be easy to install, configure and manage. At the same time, it should Integrate with current environment
• Solution should require little customization
• Reduce risk – single point of support from a trusted vendor

Mid market businesses need to accelerate their journey to a hyper convergence to make their businesses more agile. The benefits of speed, simplicity, and efficiency can indeed lower OPEX, reduce risk, and enable them to pursue revenue-generating opportunities