Hyperconverged Infrastructures (HCIs) have matured to become an important part of the data center mix for companies of all sizes, including the largest enterprises. Databases, typically the most important applications in the data center, have become the most common use case for HCI. The HCI products still most often chosen are vSAN and Nutanix, which has been consistent for the four years this study has been conducted.

The ability to consolidate and simplify infrastructure is the primary driver for HCI projects, most of which are being deployed to replace existing systems, not to support net-new applications, as was the case two years ago. As this technology continues to penetrate the enterprise data center, we are seeing a demand for improved management functionality, integrated data protection, and integrated disaster recovery features. HCI has also become a primary on-premises solution for hybrid cloud infrastructures. The downsides to this technology continue to be resource inefficiency, vendor lock-in, and cost.

In 2016, HCI was primarily used by small and mid-sized companies needing a standard infrastructure that was simple to design and operate. Since then, we have seen HCI evolve as a technology and become an essential infrastructure solution, capturing the attention of enterprise IT organizations as they worked to keep up with explosive data growth and the dynamic needs of internal development teams.

This year we show that evolution by focusing on the comparison of results from the past four years, revealing insights into where and why HCI is being adopted, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and what users expect from this technology moving forward. We also explore which advanced technology features are most desired and give insight into the trends of containers/Kubernetes, edge computing, integrated backup functionality, and public/hybrid cloud connectivity.

This research study is available for purchase. Click here for more information, a full Table of Contents and a Table of Figures.