ESG Blogs

With typical understatement, no assertive flourishes, and a complete lack of competitive gauntlet-throwing, Oracle’s Larry Ellison just announced – separate but linked – enhancements to its overall cloud strategy. Well, actually no - of course not!! While the announcements were strategic, real, and compelling, there were flashes-aplenty of the Larry we have come to expect (even from a shelter-in-place, and rather-nice-looking, kitchen)…a feisty and assured red stake placed firmly in the increasingly hybrid IT landscape.  

Digital transformation initiatives have been well documented over the last few years and result in significant changes to an organization’s people (skills), process, and technology. The top goals of these initiatives, as reported in ESG’s 2020 Technology Spending Intentions survey, are to drive greater operational efficiencies and deliver differentiated customer experiences. To accomplish these goals, organizations are actively modernizing their application environments.

Spring brings things you expect – tax day (in the US), storms and showers (in much of the Northern hemisphere), and some variant of Dell/EMC/Dell Technologies World (in whatever Las Vegas is!). But this Spring brought something unexpected too – at Dell Technologies World the discussion for the closing general session panel centered on “optimism and happiness in the digital age.” So there!

The hyperconverged market continued its meteoric rise and exploded in 2018. Virtually every vendor saw growth in their product offerings. The technology is being embraced across all verticals and use cases, and for customers, its yielding real business benefits. With the expectation that market adoption will continue to rise in 2019, here are a few things I’m expecting to impact the HCI market.

Last week saw the 2018 Hitachi Vantara NEXT conference. For those of you not following along closely, Hitachi Vantara is the artist previously known as, well, many other things...!

One of the ongoing challenges the company faces (both for itself, and indeed to a greater extent when we consider it in association with its Hitachi parent) is how to describe its panoply of abilities, both IT and otherwise, in a cohesive manner.

Hyperconverged infrastructures (HCIs) are anchored in virtualization—virtual storage, virtual compute, and virtual networking. And we know the big names in the hypervisor space: VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. Recent ESG research asked organizations what they consider to be their primary hypervisor deployed in production. Fifty five percent of organizations selected VMware vSphere, while another 36% primarily leverage Microsoft Hyper-V.

There isn’t a day without a new comment or report from industry observers about the tremendous adoption and growth of hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI). Recent ESG research indicates that, for end-users, HCI is about efficiency, operational excellence, and cost and that HCI is delivering on its promise to help drive operational excellence. Production workloads are increasingly running on HCIs anchored by Nutanix software. Specifically, our research points to 1 in 3 organizations running at least 30% of their production applications on HCI.

Organizations are being told to digitally transform, to become more agile, and to respond to the business faster in order to survive in a highly competitive market. And one way organizations are digitally transforming is by modernizing their infrastructures, which means shifting from a traditional 3-tier architecture to a solution that integrates compute, storage, networking, and virtualization. Such a solution must deliver a more cloud-like experience on-premises, making the eventual transition to the cloud easier or better yet, enabling organizations to confidently move cloud-native applications from the public cloud back to an on-premises private cloud. Both converged infrastructure (CI) and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) fit the bill, but what is driving organizations to pick one over the other?

In this discussion, part of ESG's ongoing 360 Video Series, Mike Leone breaks down some of the less-well-known attributes of converged and hyperconverged architectures. While the basic consolidation and integration of traditional IT components is well understood and valued, there are other ties to contemporary IT approaches that enhance the possibilities and impact of CI/HCI; Mike reviews those basic motivations, but also looks more broadly at such things as IoT, Edge, ML and Analytics as they pertain to the world of convergence. 

Well Nutanix .NEXT has come and gone and as I continue to digest all the announcements from Nutanix, one word comes to mind that expresses my thoughts: ambition. Why? They don't want to just be the HCI infrastructure in a data center. They want to be the data center. They want to enable hybrid cloud. They want to enable multi-cloud. They want to simplify the smart edge and enable IoT. And they want all the complexity associated with all of it to be invisible.