''Hyper convergence is the new way to deploy IT infra''

Soma Tah

Rajesh Ramnani, Regional Director at VCE tells CIOL some of the the promises of hyper-converged infrastructure and how it solves the challenges of scaling often faced in traditional infrastructure.

Excerpt:

How does the current state of hyper-converged infrastructure in India looks like and how do you foresee its growth?
Hyper-converged infrastructure is one of the most rapidly growing technologies globally and India is no exception. It is promising to dramatically shift the way infrastructure is procured, deployed and managed. It helps in simplifying and expediting the delivery of application workloads.

Market potential in India for Hyper-Converged solutions can exceed USD 15mn in FY 2016 itself, of which 50 per cent will be in Midmarket and rest will be in large enterprises and corporates.

It is one of the most preferred methods for deploying IT in the data center, as IT departments seek ways to adjust to their new role in business and new responsibilities entrusted on them. According to VCE Converged IT infrastructure survey, IT departments will spend $14.3 billion on converged infrastructure by 2018, a 27 per cent increase from the $10.2 billion that they spent in 2015.

Have you seen any specific trend behind this increased adoption?
Enterprises across sectors are working towards transforming the way their IT infrastructure operates. They want to better serve the business and want to be able to broker and deliver services from both internal and external providers. To bring agility in their business, serve their customers better and achieve their business goal organization India and taking steady steps for a digitized infrastructure.

Hyper-converged infrastructure is an answer to the organizations looking for cost efficient, simple, flexible and scalable IT infrastructure in this digital world. Organizations across verticals are moving from the traditional ‘build-it-yourself’ infrastructure to converged ‘ready-to-use’ infrastructure.
We have seen increased traction from IT/ITES, Telecom organizations and Service providers creating their public cloud platforms as well as Midmarket enterprises who want hassle free simple to use and deploy infrastructure.

Are VxRail appliances and VxRack Systems fine-tuned to these requirements?
VxRail Appliances provide a simple, cost effective hyper-converged infrastructure solution for a wide variety of applications and workloads. With VxRail Appliances, IT organizations can start small and easily scale capacity and performance by non-disruptively adding appliances to the cluster without the investment or up-front planning required with traditional infrastructure.

The recently launched VxRack System 1000 series is a self-contained units of servers and networking are well suited for use cases that require a highly scalable infrastructure. The VxRack system supports deployment of a variety of application workloads on the same infrastructure, allowing IT to rapidly deliver new services while improving overall agility and efficiency.

Does VxRack with Neutrino nodes help you score some brownie points from developers?
In today's dynamically changing digital economy, rapid application development and shortened release cycles are the new normal. DevOps, leveraging continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and a more integrated operating model and culture between developers and IT can provide a competitive edge- but shifting to DevOps is difficult without the right development platform and tools. Cloud-native platforms address this need. VxRack System with Neutrino is a turnkey rack-scale system for Infrastructure-as-a-Service, purpose built for cloud native applications. The new web-scale architecture is designed for Enterprises that are looking to transform from developing traditional (P2) applications to cloud native (P3) applications.

Who do you see as early adopters?
For VxRail the targeted verticals are early adopters like IT/ITES, BFSI, Telecom and government organizations for large hyper-converged systems. Purpose-built hyper-converged systems are good fit in Large Enterprises, Public sector and Manufacturing Units. For low to mid-range hyper-converged systems target markets include select Enterprise customers and Remote/Branch offices of large corporates.

The Indian government’s increased emphasis on campaign like ‘Make in India’ and the plans to set-up smart cities in India is paving way for the aggressive growth of hyper-converged infrastructure in India. The steady acceptance of Cloud, Mobility and Internet of Things is also leading to the demand for hyper-converged infrastructure.

Are hyper-converged infra creating new vendor silos?
Hyper convergence is the new way of deploying IT infrastructure, from 'Building your own' to 'Buy-ready'. This ensures enterprises get state of the art solution: integrated, managed and supported by technology experts. It will also enable higher uptimes, and lower costs. The components are all standard IT hardware and in no way makes the technology proprietary or creates any silo. What differs is the mode of deployment and delivery.