Converged Infrastructure Is Going Mainstream

Converged infrastructure

Converged Infrastructure Adoption

Converged infrastructure has definitely crossed the chasm. Almost half of organizations (46%) report they are already using a converged infrastructure stack, and 44% are planning or considering adoption.

Converged Infrastructure Adoption by Vertical

Converged infrastructure opportunities for solution providers span almost every vertical. Finance and technology companies, as usual, lead with 34.5% and 17.9%, respectively. Education comes in third, at 7.1 %. When it comes to consideration, manufacturing jumps from 3.6% to 8.6 %.

Reasons for Moving to Converged Infrastructure

The benefits of converged infrastructure are tough to ignore. More efficient provisioning of resources (70%) and more agility (66%) were the top reasons to shift to converged infrastructure, followed by lower operating costs, at 63%.

Drivers of Converged Infrastructure Adoption

Virtualization forces the converged infrastructure issue. In fact, 58% cited the adoption of VMware as the initiative to drive their adoption, while 33.8% attributed the shift to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) technology.

New Drivers of Converged Infrastructure Adoption

Big data and custom applications create a new source of demand. While VMware still drives the need for new projects, at 30.1%, big data and custom applications ranked second (23.3%) and third (21.9%).

Blade Count by Early Converged Infrastructure Adopter

Blade server density is on the rise. Almost half (49.5%) are running 17 or more blades per server. Nine to 16 blades are being deployed by 36.8%.

Reasons for Not Adopting Converged Infrastructure

Inertia remains a powerful IT force. A full 41.2% said their existing IT infrastructure works just fine.

Taking Charge of Converged Infrastructure

Multiple teams within the IT organization are driving converged infrastructure adoption. Almost 60% said the server team is in charge. The virtualization team was cited by 52.6%.

IT Staffing Implications

The internal IT organization will be run by “data center engineers” with multiple skills. IT organizations plan to increase virtualization, server and networking staffing, but a full 70% expect to have a dedicated converged infrastructure unit by 2015.

Top Converged Infrastructure Vendors Considered

Cisco and Hewlett-Packard generally face off most when it comes to converged infrastructure. Cisco UCS leads (64.6%), followed by Hewlett-Packard (58.2%), NetApp FlexPod (48.1%) and VCE Vblock (45.6%). However, 41.8% said they are considering building their own.

Top Converged Infrastructure Vendors Chosen

When Cisco UCS is added to NetApp FlexPod or VCE Vblock, Cisco dominates the category. Cisco UCS leads at 57%, followed by Hewlett-Packard at 41.8%.

Converged Infrastructure Being Considered Now

There is a strong desire to build best-of-breed systems. A full 46.9% are still thinking about building their own, followed by 37% and 25.9% who are considering Cisco and Hewlett-Packard.

Top Orchestration Tools for Converged Infrastructure

VMware extends virtual machine dominance into management. VMware vCloud leads at 44%, followed by Puppet Labs at 32% and homegrown scripts at 29.3%.

Top Orchestration Tools Being Considered

OpenStack gains a lot of mindshare. VMware vCloud still leads at 30.5%, but OpenStack is already at 29.2%, followed by Cisco at 20.8%.

Converged Infrastructure Management Tools in Use

No one tool dominates converged infrastructure. Half the respondents are using multiple tools they already own followed by 46.1% citing tools supplied by converged infrastructure vendors.

The Converged Infrastructure Pay-Off

Of the early adopters, 78.7% cite improved productivity and 73.3% report improved customer satisfaction.