Nearly one quarter of respondents to the latest survey have hyperconverged infrastructure either in a pilot phase or in plans for future adoption. It is evolving from supportive, edge infrastructure into a primary component of today's IT organisations with 74.4% of organisations using hyperconverged infrastrucure in their core or central data centres.
This dramatic rise of converged infrastructure is not just changing the technological identity of IT environments; it is also changing the personnel who manage the technology. The larger the enterprise, the more prevalent the change with 41.3% of very large enterprises (10,000 or more employees) in the survey planning to change their IT teams.
The survey results show that converged infrastructure is a catalyst for IT team transformation. More than one-third (35.5%) of enterprises say they have added more virtual machine specialists as a result of adopting standard converged systems. This is more than double the number of organisations actively adding hardware specialists.
Surprisingly, despite the increase in virtualisation specialists, containers remain nascent in today's enterprises. More than half of survey respondents (50.7%) indicate that none of their servers run containers and another 22.3% are running containers on 10% or fewer of their x86 servers. 451 Research expects container adoption to rise as enterprises take advantage of their lightweight nature to ease entry into an agile, DevOps IT model. However, the rate of adoption will depend heavily on the ability to find adequate personnel to manage the technology.
"Loyalties to traditional, standalone servers are diminishing in today's IT ecosystems as managers adopt innovative technologies that eliminate multiple pain points," said Christian Perry, Research Manager at 451 Research and lead author of 'Voice of the Enterprise: Servers and Converged Infrastructure – Organizational Dynamics'. "Innovation inherent in converged systems, and in hyperconverged infrastructure in particular, is driving process efficiencies and agility that are increasingly tangible.
"Today's businesses expect the same flexibility from their internal IT that a public cloud service can provide," Perry added. "Converged and hyperconverged infrastructure are transforming the technology that underpins today's business and the teams that manage it. As a result, we're rapidly approaching the day when the generalist infrastructure administrator emerges as the key cog in business operations."
The Voice of the Enterprise: Servers and Converged Infrastructure service focuses on disruption occurring in the servers and converged infrastructure market and exposes the major opportunities for enterprises, vendors, suppliers and investors. The primary focus of the second quarter study is on 2016 organizational dynamics, including vendor and product spending growth and allocations, as well as skills gaps and staffing strategies. Based on research conducted in July and August 2016 with more than 750 IT professionals worldwide, the quarterly study combines 451 Research's analysis with survey response and in-depth interviews from a panel of more than 40,000 senior IT buyers and enterprise technology executives.
