HCI Deployments To Ramp Amid Growing Demand At The Edge
Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) shipments will grow at a 70% CAGR out to 2022, surpassing 1M units by 2022, driven by enterprise investment. HCIs are servers that include compute, network, and storage with an integrated software stack providing orchestration and virtualization of the compute, network, and storage resources. Demand for HCI at the edge is growing for workloads like analytics of IoT data, according to IHS Markit’s Data Center Server Equipment Tracker.
“HCI is well suited to the needs of enterprises as less configuration is needed when the equipment arrives, and once it’s deployed, management is easier. HCI is also attractive to small enterprises as a form of low cost storage as they won’t need to invest in costly storage arrays,” said Vladimir Galabov, principal analyst, cloud and data center research practice IHS Markit. “We’ve also seen a growing number of deployments and customer interest for HCI at the enterprise edge where a small rack with 2-4 HCI nodes is deployed at a retail store or a local office for data consolidation and real-time analytics workloads.”