You've heard of "converged" infrastructure -- servers, storage and networks essentially blended together in a data center. Now, along comes the hyperconverged infrastructure trend. But what exactly does it mean for the midmarket?
Tech vendors offer growing portfolios of hyperconverged appliances -- all-in-one solutions that bring hardware and virtualization together. Examples include:
Midmarket customers, in particular, should embrace hyperconverged infrastructure to ease overall IT management and scalability while driving down costs, Gartner stated in June 2015.
Among the market researcher's key points: The costs associated with refreshing data center hardware, at midmarket scale (80 to 120 production virtual machines (VMs) and 30 to 50 TBs of storage, coupled with their high levels of virtualization (80% to 90%) are piquing midmarket I&O leaders' interest in HCIS.
“We believe that highly virtualized midsize enterprises with fewer than 200 virtual machines should absolutely opt for hyperconverged infrastructure,” Gartner wrote in that midmarket hyperconverged report.
Still, plenty of CIOs prefer best-of-breed solutions that their internal IT teams -- or channel partners -- piece together. But a best-of-breed approach can sometimes drive costs up -- since you're buying a la carte from multiple vendors. Converged infrastructure -- and now, hyperconverged infrastructure -- aims to drive those costs down by placing all the horsepower from a single vendor under one hood.
