Europe leads North America in hyperconverged infrastructure adoption and planning

European businesses are planning to deploy hyperconverged infrastructure, with late 2015/early 2016 set to see a major wave of adoption across EMEA. Research conducted by ActualTech Media for its recent EMEA report 2015 State of Hyperconverged Infrastructure Market, found a growing market with most organisations expecting to adopt such solutions in the next 24 to 36 months.

Hyperconverged infrastructure is a virtual computing infrastructure solution that seamlessly combines core data centre functions and services into an appliance form factor, which accelerates the speed and agility of deploying virtualized workloads, reduces complexity, improves operational efficiency, and lowers costs. ActualTech Media’s independent research found that hyperconvergence has a direct impact on advancing EMEA respondents’ top five IT priorities of improving data backup/recovery, improving operational efficiency, data centre consolidation, virtualization desktop infrastructure (VDI) and deploying a ‘private cloud’ infrastructure.

“The IT priorities outlined in the report underscore the shift IT organisations are making to modernize infrastructure – and the critical role of hyperconvergence in driving this transformation,” said Marianne Budnik, chief marketing officer, SimpliVity, a leader in hyperconvergence and sponsor of ActualTech Media’s report. “These pain points show that IT organisations are looking to simplify their IT infrastructure without losing enterprise-grade performance, data protection and efficiency, and global unified management. True hyperconverged infrastructure provides those capabilities in a cost-effective solution. It combines more than just storage and compute, hyperconverged infrastructure also converges the functionality of the entire data centre stack below the hypervisor and scales to meet the needs of both large and midsized organisations.”

The key findings of the research conducted among businesses in EMEA included:

· Europe is leading North America on a fast track to hyperconvergence – 27 percent of EMEA respondents are already using hyperconverged infrastructure, compared to 24 percent in North America. Of those EMEA respondents that haven’t already adopted, more than two thirds (67 percent) plan to deploy hyperconverged infrastructure in the next 24-36 months, compared to just 51 percent in North America.

· Cost Savings Drive EMEA Adoption – Almost two-thirds (62%) of hyperconverged infrastructure adopters in EMEA reference drivers related to cost savings as the catalyst for hyperconverged infrastructure adoption, which includes data centre consolidation (28%), cost reduction (17%) and improving operational efficiency (17%).

· Top Two IT Priorities are Data Protection and Operational Efficiency – In EMEA and across the globe, improving data backup, disaster recovery and business continuity, and improving operational efficiency were the two top IT priorities for respondents. However, EMEA respondents also prioritised data centre consolidation and deploying private cloud infrastructure at a higher rate – each by 10 points or more – versus North American respondents.

“Our main goal has always been to help IT professionals determine the solutions that are going to most significantly benefit the data centres within their organisations,” said Scott Lowe, co-founder, ActualTech Media. “This research indicates that IT pros are beginning to see that a number of IT pain points can be significantly reduced or solved though implementing a hyperconverged infrastructure, but that vendors in this space still have work to do when it comes to articulating some of these benefits.”

The report advises IT professionals to:

Weigh the potential benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure for specific initiatives, especially as part of their data centre upgrade cycles.
Find a focused entry point or use case or hyperconverged infrastructure to initiate adoption in lieu of a rip-and-replace-approach to data centre modernisation
Consider IT needs holistically, instead of reviewing data centre services and resources individually—especially since hyperconverged infrastructure has the potential to address a number of identified IT priorities.
Take a total cost of ownership (TCO) approach to reviewing hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, since hyperconverged infrastructure is more cost effective when productivity savings and operational improvements are factored in.