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Hyper-convergence and containers key storage-related deployments in 2018
Hyper-converged infrastructure and containers are key deployments planned by UK customers in 2018, with flash storage, virtual machine storage and disk backup also prominent
Hyper-converged infrastructure and container management are key storage-related projects for UK organisations in 2018.
The 2018 ComputerWeekly/TechTarget IT priorities survey, which questioned 243 IT professionals in the UK, found the proportion of respondents that plan to deploy hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) had nearly trebled year-on-year, from 9% to 22%.
Meanwhile, those that plan to work on container management this year – of which storage is a key component – saw a jump to just over double those that planned to in 2017, from 8% of respondents to 17%.
Hyper-converged infrastructure is a key trend in the datacentre. HCI appliances bring together compute and storage in one box, often with a hypervisor built in. These nodes can then be clustered in scale-out fashion to grow performance and capacity.
Initially starting as an option for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), being well-suited to organisations with fewer IT resources, HCI tools have taken off across all sizes of organisation.
Containers, meanwhile, are a form of virtualisation that operates at the host operating system (OS) level, unlike virtual machines (VMs) that each have an OS of their own. Containers have been designed to be rapidly deployable, possibly short-lived building application blocks. Their benefits are they can quickly scale and are portable between operating environments and so allow an agile response to application demand.
Key to their use is the need to develop and manage persistent storage, with containers also used to provide a means to point to storage resources.
Read more about hyper-converged and container storage
- With compute requirements often fragmented, short-lived and bursty, traditional storage architectures can struggle to cope – so is storage in containers the solution?
- The rise of hyper-converged infrastructure – with compute, storage and networks in one box – seems ideal for SMEs, but is it always a better idea than traditional IT architecture?
Other areas that saw a growth in the number of planned deployments in 2018 included flash arrays, with 9% planning to roll them out this year compared to 6% last year, and storage for virtual environments, which saw an increase in planned deployments from 11% in 2017 to 18% this year.
The deployment of storage for virtual environments also brings with it the need to back up VMs, and here there was growth too, with 29% planning a roll-out compared to 17% in 2017.
Finally, there was a noticeable increase in plans to deploy disk for backup, up from 8% of respondents to 13%. This could include deployments of hyper-converged backup appliances, which have emerged in the past year as a means of building clusters of secondary storage for backups, with the advantages of HCI.
