EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Today's enterprise datacenter can be one of the most complex business environments with dozens
(for smaller businesses), hundreds (for larger and midsize businesses), and even thousands
(for hyperscale businesses) of servers that must be managed and monitored. At this level, just being
able to manage the cords can be a challenge — let alone keeping up with the growing need for more
agility and scalability within the datacenter. Simply put, companies are aggressively looking for less
complexity and more agility from their servers. Hyperconverged solutions deliver simplicity in spades with
their plug-and-play setup and their ability to deploy workloads faster than traditional servers.
What Is Hyperconverged?
Hyperconverged systems are an emerging breed of solutions that natively collapse core storage,
compute, and storage networking functions into a single software solution or appliance. This is in
contrast to traditional integrated platforms and systems in which autonomous compute, storage, and
networking systems are integrated at the factory by the vendor or by resellers. In addition to integrating
storage and compute functions into a single node (or a cluster of nodes, each offering compute and
storage functions), all hyperconverged systems employ:
A distributed file system or an object store that serves as the data organization, management,
and access platform
A hypervisor that provides workload adjacency, management, and containerization in addition
to providing the hardware abstraction layer (Further, the hypervisor hosts essential
management software needed to manage the platform and is also used to bootstrap the server
hardware.)
An (optional) Ethernet switch to provide scale-out and/or high-availability capabilities
(However, switching and/or networking is used not to bridge the compute and storage layers
but to provide high-availability and resiliency capabilities to the storage and computing stacks.)
The hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market segment integrates a collection of technologies that
span the functional areas of storage, computing, networking, hypervisor-based virtualization,
containers, and infrastructure management. IDC estimates that the market for hyperconverged
infrastructure is in the beginning stage of development and penetration, and we believe the opportunity
for this market to be quite significant.