We are going through a digital era where it is imperative to modernise your IT infrastructure in order to operate in an efficient and agile manner and accelerate your digital transformation journey. Organisations are looking at various systems which will help them in these modernisation efforts and one of the most popular of these is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).
In the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region, HCI is expected to grow at a 5 year Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.6% through to 2025, reaching a total value of $453 million by 2025. Some of the key vendors in this space include Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Nutanix, Huawei and Cisco.
While Dell Technologies is the market leader in the HCI space we have seen several vendors make great strides in this segment and invest a lot in marketing of these systems thus gaining market share in the last couple of years.
We are seeing a growing demand for HCI in the region due to the numerous benefits they have to offer over traditional systems. It is important for organisations to plan their data centre deployments keeping in mind not just their current but their future requirements as well. Below are some of the benefits HCI systems have to offer:
- Quick deployment – HCI is usually very quick to deploy, almost like a plug and play system and is known for its simplicity in operation. They usually come as pre-defined packs which you can easily buy and start running within a few clicks.
- Scalability – HCI is very easily scalable and works very well for organisations not looking to invest a huge amount of capital initially, especially during the covid-19 pandemic where we have seen many organisations cutting back on IT budgets. Hence, an organisation can start small and grown gradually as the demand arises.
- Economical – Investing in HCI means having to spend less on individual server, storage, networks and management interfaces as HCI allows you to consolidate compute, storage and network into a single system, thus reducing the overall costs.
- Better utilisation of resources – We have seen many organisations across the region have resources lying idle in their datacenters. With HCI, we have seen better utilisation of resources, as these systems make it easier for organisations to switch workloads using existing infrastructure.
- Efficient management of infrastructure – The region is affected by technical skill shortages and HCI helps address this issue as HCI is software-defined and the time and skills required to maintain these systems is much lesser than traditional systems. Also, there are fewer systems to manage versus individual server, storage and network possibly requiring individual tech experts.
- Integration with cloud – HCI systems are very popular for customers moving to the cloud, given these systems run exactly the same way in the data centre as they do in the cloud. According to an IDC survey conducted in the beginning of 2021, 41% of CIOs in the MEA region said they are planning to move to Hybrid cloud models in the next 12 – 18 months. HCI systems lay a good foundation for organisations looking to move to hybrid environments in the future.
- Data protection – HCI systems are built with disaster recovery and backup functions that help organisations restore data easily and within much lesser time that traditional infrastructure.
Investing in modern infrastructure like HCI, will eventually help organisations concentrate less on the actual infrastructure and more time can be spent on innovation and adding value to their businesses.
