Cirrus Networks : Technical Update from Phil Geson, Cirrus’ Cisco Pre Sales Consultant on Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Only a few years ago Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) was pretty much unheard of. A recent Gartner report stated that HCI will grow from practically what was a zero-dollar market in 2012 to be a $5 Billion market by 2019. If Gartner are on the money, then that would mean that HCI will represent 35% of the total Integrated System market revenue in 2019.

So what is driving this rapid growth?

To understand that we need to look at what is happening outside of IT. The Digitisation of business and the constant disruption of markets and industries, think Uber, AirBnB, Netflix and Facebook.

Cisco's Chairman, John Chambers was quoted as saying that 40% of the Fortune 500 Companies will NOT exist in the next 10 years because of a failure to adapt to the digital era. These are large, established, successful companies that are not immune. At Cisco Live, held in Melbourne in March, Cisco predicted you have 2 years, 3 if you are lucky until your business is disrupted in some shape or form. Business Leaders are beginning to sit up and realise that something needs to be done in order to survive and they are turning to IT Leaders for answers.

To break it down there are a few critical ingredients I believe are required to digitise your business. These are; Data Insights, Agility and Speed. These ingredients begin to create demand to;

• Simplify Operations - by collapsing infrastructure silos and management platforms.
• Accelerate Provisioning - With the availability of Cloud Storage and Compute Services it has set the expectation for nearly instantaneous access to resources, with no patience for the hours, days or sometimes weeks it takes for traditional IT to provision.
• Faster Data Insights - By producing insights in a timely fashion to either gain a tactical advantage over the competition or find a new opportunity to drive business growth.

All of this relies on the underlying infrastructure and architecture you deploy and it all begins in the datacentre.