MIAMI – It wasn’t long ago that hyper-converged infrastructure was classified as a market trend. Today, hyper-converged is poised to hit the billion dollar market milestone.
Eric Sheppard, IDC market analyst, said the hyper-converged market will be a billion dollar market shortly, at the Nutanix .Next Conference.
According to IDC, it is currently growing at 116 per cent and should reach $800 million market by the end of 2015. Going into 2016 the growth rate is expected to be 94 per cent and the market should pass $1.5 billion worldwide.
IDC tallies the worldwide hyper converged infrastructure market with hardware and software.
Boosted by this market surge in hyper-converged, San Jose, Calif.-based Nutanix recently announced a new mission for the hyper-converged; to make it invisible, said vice president of marketing Howard Ting.
What Nutanix means by being invisible is to turn IT infrastructure from complexity to just having it work. Supporting this new approach are new product releases headed by XCP, the Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform, which is made up of two product lines Acropolis and Prism.
The new XCP features advanced app mobility, native virtualization and consumer-grade search capability for the data centre.
The strategy behind the Nutanix invisible approach is the current apps run on traditional storage and virtualization products and the complexity with that creates too many time consuming scenarios along with inconsistent costs. Scaling and migration are other issues with data centres, today, according to Nutanix.
“Invisible means it just works. Flick the lightswitch and it powers your home. You do not worry about the plugs or the volts,” he said.
Ting cited some example of how invisibility has improved society.
Currency for payments was at one time complex because if you took your money to another country you needed to change it and have a new denomination and exchange rate. Credit cards made that hard process easier because you can purchase anything and it provides documention on it.
“If you use Uber you do not pay. Uber pays for us. Payments are invisible and it has enriched our lives. No longer worry about expense reports because they email you a receipt,” Ting said.
WiFi over dial up connectivity. “That noise is now a ringtone for your phone,” Ting said.
Roomba for cleaning your home. “No one cleans their house anymore.”
The Google self driving car. “Even driving is becoming invisible.”
Ting added that today IT infrastructure is cleary not invisible. “IT has too many silos, guesswork, over provisioning and manual processes. This is our mission to deliver invisible IT infrastructure,” Ting said.
Suneel Potti, Nutanix senior vice president or product management, said XCP with Acropolis and Prism attempts to achieve cloud and virtualization invisibility. The company is also working towards making storage invisible as well.
“XCP allows you to start quickly, start small and scale forever. This is leading to the re-platforming of the enterprise data centre; not re-invention of it but re-platforming and that’s our journey towards invisible IT infrastructure,” Potti said.
Corporation Service Company (CSC), a 100-year old business, legal and financial services provider based in Wilmington, Del. used Nutanix to migrate 275 VDIs and 25 TBs of storage and it needed to be down in a few days, according to Karen Zetes, director of infrastructure for CSC.
“Nutanix did it in a few hours. They powered it up and completed the install and configuration in 75 minutes. Its completely unheard of. All the VDI and the validation checks was done in 64 hours,” she said.
Zetes now believes they all of CSC’s IT infrastructure can now be invisible. “The staff sees it as invisible and now they can focus on their jobs instead of the infrastructure,” she added.
Acropolis will have distributed storage fabric that enables common Web-scale services across multiple storage protocols. Acropolis can now mount volumes as in-guest iSCSI storage for applications with specific storage protocol requirements such as Microsoft Exchange.
Also featured in the new Acropolis is App Mobility Fabric, an open environment for virtual machines, VM migration, and VM conversion, as well as cross-hypervisor high availability and integrated disaster recovery.
The Acropolis Hypervisor includes a native hypervisor based on the proven Linux KVM hypervisor.
Meanwhile Prism will now have One-Click technology IT tasks that are time consuming. This will include one-click software upgrades as well.
It also brings storage, compute and virtualization resources into a unified system to provide an end-to-end view of all workflows.
