Organizations with smaller IT teams, and many others, have already adopted hyper-converged technologies. According to the latest market study by 451 Research, hyperconverged infrastructure is used at 40 percent of companies, with more deployments expected during the next two years.
Nearly one quarter of survey respondents indicated that they have these systems either in a current pilot, or included in future plans. The research uncovered that hyperconverged systems are evolving from prior network edge applications into a primary component of Hybrid IT infrastructure.
The latest quarterly survey results indicate that 74.4 percent of the respondent organizations currently using hyperconverged have deployed the solutions in their central data centers, signaling a key transition.
Hyperconverged Systems Market Development
"Loyalties to traditional, standalone x86 servers are diminishing in today's IT ecosystems as managers adopt innovative technologies that eliminate multiple pain points," said Christian Perry, research manager at 451 Research. "Innovation inherent in converged systems, and in hyperconverged infrastructure in particular, is driving process efficiency and agility that's tangible."
This infrastructure has changed the identity of IT environments, and the technical staff who manage these systems. The larger the enterprise, the more prevalent the change. Case in point: 41.3 percent of very large enterprises in the latest survey plan to change the skills composition of their IT team.
Moreover, converged infrastructure is viewed as a catalyst for ongoing IT team transformation. In fact, 35.5 percent of survey respondents say they've added more virtual machine specialists as a result of adopting standard converged systems.
That's more than double the number of organizations actively adding specialists in hardware-specific areas -- such as traditional servers, storage and networking. And yet, despite the increase in virtualization specialists, containers remain nascent in surveyed organizations.
Outlook for Containers and Microservices
Furthermore, 50.7 percent of respondents report none of their servers currently run containers, and another 22.3 percent are only running containers on 10 percent or fewer of their servers. That being said, analysts expect Linux container adoption to increase, as more IT organizations adopt a DevOps model.
However, the rate of adoption will depend on the ability to find skilled IT staff to manage the technology. Besides, informed line of businesses (LoB) leaders expect the same flexibility from their internal IT organization that a public cloud service provider can routinely offer.
Clearly, these converged and hyperconverged systems are disrupting the IT status quo. As a result, analysts believe that the generalist-driven infrastructure administrator will likely emerge as the key hybrid cloud system custodian in a typical business technology environment.
