Accelerated Growth of Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Software-Defined Storage in Modern Data Centres

ActualTech Media, LLC,  in partnership with Atlantis Computing, Inc., released its Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCIS) and Software-Defined Storage (SDS) 2016 Survey to provide insight on how IT organisations are building modern data centres in 2016 and beyond.

The survey, conducted with more than 1,267 data centre leaders from 53 countries, revealed that 71%  either already use or are considering adoption of HCIS or SDS.

“There is a lot of confusion and hype in the fast changing HCIS and SDS markets and it is critical to gather data about real-world usage,” explained Scott D. Lowe, partner and co-founder, ActualTech Media. “We believe this is the largest and most detailed account of adoption, buying criteria and use cases for HCIS and SDS. The new report provides IT organisations with critical insights on how HCIS and SDS technologies are being used, actual experiences from the field and the future plans of data centre leaders from around the world.”

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Capacity at remote locations for those that have deployed
hyperconverged infratructure and software-defined storage
(N=342)

Why are organisations adopting SDS and HCI?
While 75% or organisations currently use disk-based storage, only 44% have it as part of their future infrastructure plans. Further, 19% of organisations expect to decommission disk-based SAN entirely in favour of either HCIS or SDS. When asked about their key decision criteria for adoption of SDS and HCIS, IT organisations cited performance (72%), HA (68%) and cost (68%) as top requirements.

Continued data growth was also a key driver for change, with median annual data growth rates of 20% reported by survey respondents. Most IT organisations must support these growth rates with flat or decreasing budgets, making the efficiency of data centre infrastructure increasingly important for businesses.

“The ActualTech Media survey provides great perspective on the HCIS and SDS markets with results and analyses that simply have not been available in this rapidly growing and evolving category,” said Seth Knox, VP of product marketing, Atlantis. “For the first time, we have access to quantitative data on hypervisor trends, HA configuration, evaluation criteria, software versus hardware HCIS preferences and many other dynamics that will shape the HCIS and SDS markets in 2016.”

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Types of storage systems currently in use by company size
(multiple choices alowed)

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The future of storage in data center
(N=1,267)

Further extracts and insight from this research report will be published later in January 2016 in a new book, Building a Modern Data Center: Principles and Strategies of Design, written by Scott D. Lowe, David M. Davis and James Green.