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This content is based on Forrester senior analyst Naveen Chhabra's video sharing and related data insights into the development of the super-converged market. In the recently released industry report "Now Tech: Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Q2 2020", Naveen gives the recommendations of several global super-convergence vendors, including SmartX, as well as an overview of the trend of the super-convergence market. In this video, Naveen provides further interpretation of some important trends, including:

In 2020, super-convergence will continue to maintain healthy growth, and the amount of growth is expected to reach US $9 billion; flexibility, ease of management and fast delivery are the main factors attracting IT leaders to choose super-converged innovative IT architecture; super-converged deployment scenarios gradually evolve from VDI to key enterprise application scenarios such as databases, ERP, and edge workloads Super convergence is becoming the main solution for enterprises to build private and hybrid cloud infrastructure; a new generation of hardware upgrades, such as Intel Aoten persistent memory, will help Super Convergence meet more stringent challenges.

The following is a supplementary explanation of the sharing record and some of the views.

Naveen:

Hello, everyone. During this special period, I hope you and your family will keep safe and healthy. I am Naveen Chhabra, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, in charge of super-integration global market research. Hyper-converged infrastructure, or hyper-converged infrastructure, is currently one of the most popular infrastructure technologies. In this video, I will share relevant data and market insights on superconvergence deployment, including: why do IT leaders choose superconvergence? In what areas do IT leaders deploy superconvergence? What benefits can IT leaders gain from the transition to a new architecture? I will also discuss the development trend of the super-integration market in the next few years.

Q1: what is the growth rate of the super-converged market in the next three years?

Naveen: according to the Forrester Research market outlook assessment, the super-converged market will continue to replace traditional data center technologies with healthy growth in double-digit percentage. Cloud technology and its benefits are profoundly affecting IT leaders and their decisions. In a large number of enterprise applications, the proportion of super-converged infrastructure is also gradually increasing. The relevant use cases show that super-convergence vendors are driving innovation through themselves and with the entire ecological partner. As the existing IT infrastructure is phased out or upgraded, the needs, drivers, expectations, and experience of IT leaders will drive super-convergence to become an inevitable technology trend.

Figure 1

More insight: as can be seen from figure 1, up to 73% of respondents said they have deployed or are about to deploy a super-converged architecture, and 22% of them have not only deployed a super-converged architecture, but also upgraded or expanded the architecture. In addition, the proportion of customers who are implementing and planning to purchase super-convergence has exceeded that of traditional all-flash arrays.

Q2: what are the main factors driving the growth of the super-integrated market?

Naveen: in the traditional three-tier architecture, IT leaders face many challenges such as architecture fragmentation or isolation. By consolidating compute and storage into standard x86 servers, IT leaders can achieve the following benefits:

The first is flexibility. For business and technology leaders, flexibility will have an impact on multiple levels. Flexibility means not only the expansion and performance of the technology. Flexibility also includes a resource consumption expenditure model, seamless expansion to the public cloud, and no locking.

The second is faster service delivery, which refers to the ability to build infrastructure services quickly. When upgrading the IT architecture, the super-converged infrastructure is more integrated and less time-consuming. At the same time, compared with the traditional three-tier architecture, the upgrade pressure is less.

The third benefit is the simplicity of operation and maintenance. Compared with the previous technology, super-integration greatly simplifies the equipment update and operation and maintenance management.

Figure 2

More insight: the reasons for the increasing popularity of super convergence include not only the flexibility, easy management and fast delivery mentioned by Naveen Chhabra, but also the convenience of business innovation, data protection, simple deployment, flexibility and scalability, as well as low cost and low technical difficulty. It is worth noting to figure 2 that, in addition to the advantages of the super-converged architecture itself, 21% of respondents said that the enterprise's multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategy requires the deployment of a super-converged architecture.

Q3: how have the target customers and scenarios of super-converged deployment changed in the past two years?

Naveen: once upon a time, superconvergence was mainly used as the infrastructure for VDI deployment. At present, although VDI is still the main use case for superconvergence, many organizations are deploying critical business applications. Key business applications include SAP, MS SQL, Oracle and other relational databases, scale-out databases and other databases. Enterprises also deploy distributed file systems and analyze workloads based on a super-converged architecture. Over the past few years, IT leaders have also used hyperconvergence for edge deployments. Such as deploying on cruise ships, or running file and printing services in remote branches, or running customer business applications. As you can see, superconvergence is currently being used in a variety of application cases in data centers, remote offices, and branch offices.

Figure 3

More insight: unlike the inherent perception that VDI is usually deployed based on hyperconvergence and branches, more and more critical applications are being deployed on superconverged architectures. As you can see from figure 3, the deployment of Oracle, MS SQL and other databases based on super-converged architecture has become the first deployment scenario, accounting for 49%. At the same time, 35 per cent of respondents said they deployed enterprise-class applications such as SAP on top of a super-converged architecture.

Q4: what role does super convergence play in the development of enterprise cloud?

Naveen: according to Forrester research, superconvergence is expected to boost growth by $9 billion by 2020. Many companies are expanding their super-converged application scenarios. One of the main application scenarios is to deploy superconvergence in private and hybrid cloud environments. 32% of respondents said they were using hyperconvergence for private cloud infrastructure (figure 3), and 21% said hyperconvergence was the basis of hybrid cloud infrastructure (figure 3). Technology leaders can use hyperconvergence for hybrid clouds and can achieve direct connectivity between internal and public clouds in a variety of use cases, including public clouds as storage tiers to public clouds as target sites for disaster recovery.

Figure 4

More insight: with regard to private cloud deployment options, 28% of respondents said they would adopt a super-converged architecture. In fact, super-converged products give the IaaS layer truly distributed architecture and software-defined attributes, resulting in the "cloud" characteristics of consolidation of storage and computing resources, on-demand expansion and on-demand investment, while converged deployment further simplifies the IT infrastructure and reduces the total cost of ownership of the system. At present, the transformation of private cloud IaaS layer cloud based on commercial super-convergence products and cloud management platform is becoming the mainstream solution.

Q5: how to promote the development of super-convergence due to the progress of hardware such as Intel Aoten persistent memory?

Naveen:

At present, many enterprises use super-fusion for relational databases, analysis tasks, and scale-out databases. These organizations use superconvergence for critical applications and applications with stringent performance requirements, where performance degradation will cause huge losses to enterprises. Hardware improvements and upgrades, such as storage class memory (SCM) and persistent memory, are very important developments. For example, in use cases such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, performance needs to be improved by multiple orders of magnitude. Equipment suppliers, such as Intel, are working with super-convergence vendors for verification, testing and deployment. Super convergence with hardware accelerators can meet the performance, capacity and latency requirements of the new generation of applications.

I hope the above sharing of super-converged deployment and market will be helpful to you. If you have any related questions, you can continue to communicate with me. Thank you.

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