The 2014 State of Converged Infrastructure Report

Transcription

1 Own IT. Own IT. WHITE PAPER The 2014 State of Converged Infrastructure Report

2 Table of Contents EXECUTIVE SUMMARY... 3 ABOUT ZENOSS... 4 METHODOLOGY... 4 SURVEY SAMPLE... 4 THE 2014 STATE OF CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE REPORT... 5 ADOPTION OF CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE... 5 WHO IS ADOPTING CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE?... 5 WHY IS CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE PURSUED?... 6 WHY CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE NOW?... 7 WHY NOT CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE?... 9 WHAT VENDORS AND SOLUTIONS ARE CONSIDERED AND THEN PURCHASED?... 9 AFTER THE DECISION: LIVING WITH CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE STAFFING FOR CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE APPROACH TO ORCHESTRATION AND PROVISIONING PERFORMANCE AND AVAILABILITY MANAGEMENT IMPROVED PRODUCTIVITY VOICES OF EXPERIENCE: ADVICE FROM EARLY ADOPTERS...17 FINAL WORD DEMOGRAPHICS OF SURVEY RESPONDENTS... 19

3 Executive Summary In the second quarter of 2014, Zenoss conducted its second annual State of Converged Infrastructure survey to explore how technology leaders are using converged infrastructure such as Cisco UCS, NetApp FlexPod, and VCE VBlock to respond to business needs for agility and speed. Primarily focused on North American and multi-national organizations, the survey received responses from 183 IT professionals across the globe. The responses came from dozens of industries in companies of all sizes, and included perspectives from C-Level executives, IT directors and managers, system administrators, server, storage, and network administrators, system architects, applications developers, and more. The 2014 Converged Infrastructure survey provides the following insights: Adoption of converged infrastructure is proceeding briskly 46% of the organizations surveyed are already using a converged infrastructure stack. Another 44% of organizations are considering or planning converged infrastructure adoption; of these, 70% expect to have a converged infrastructure unit deployed by Organizations have more than one converged infrastructure stack, but Cisco UCS and its derivatives, VCE Vblock and NetApp FlexPod, dominate the marketplace. Non-Cisco UCS converged infrastructure offerings that were also considered before purchase include HP (58.2%), Oracle (39.2%), EMC VSPEX (39.2%), IBM Pure System (38%), and Dell (38%). Among companies with employees, 20% already have converged infrastructure, while another 67% are actively considering converged infrastructure. Surprising industry early adopter, but adoption reasons remain unchanged The finance industry appears to adopting converged infrastructure most rapidly; technology companies come in as a distant second. VMware projects continue to be the key drivers of converged infrastructure adoption. Other big drivers include big data, infrastructure-as-a service (IaaS), unified communications, and custom application development. Agility and efficiency are the two leading reasons for the adoption and consideration of converged infrastructure. Many plan on building their own converged infrastructure, but not many do Of the companies considering or planning for converged infrastructure, 46.9% plan on building it themselves. Of the companies who do have converged infrastructure in place, only 22% went the DIY route, and this number is actually down from the findings of the 2013 survey, where one in three organizations had deployed their own homegrown converged infrastructure. Converged infrastructure appears to be delivering solid value 73.3% report delivering better customer service with converged infrastructure, while only 1.3% believe that their customer service has gotten worse since bringing on converged infrastructure. 1

4 Server and virtualization teams continue to carry the converged infrastructure bag While some companies have put together a dedicated converged infrastructure team, for most companies it is still the server and the virtualization teams that carry the management responsibilities for their converged infrastructure deployment. Organizations are still not considering modernization of their infrastructure management Despite upgrading their infrastructure, most organization are still not doing much to upgrade their tools, and they expect to continue supporting their environment with multiple tools. Why No Thanks to converged infrastructure? Only about 9.8% of the respondents said they had no interest in converged infrastructure, with the most common reason being, Our infrastructure is working fine (41%). Three others came in second at 23.5% each vendor lockin, wanting to pick best of breed components, and the current price of the offerings. About Zenoss, Inc. Zenoss is a leading provider of unified IT monitoring and management software for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT infrastructures. Over 35,000 organizations worldwide have deployed Zenoss to manage their networks, servers, virtual devices, storage, and cloud infrastructure, gaining visibility and control of their IT operations. Customers include Alior Banks, Hosting.com, Huntington, NWN Corporation, Rackspace, SAIC, SunGard, Telstra, VMware, the US Army, and the US Air Force. Methodology Zenoss provides industry news, commentary, operational best practices, and insights to a community of IT professionals 100,000-strong. This community was polled in the second quarter of 2014 about their current status regarding converged infrastructure. Organizations that had already adopted converged infrastructure were asked about their experiences to date. Those considering converged infrastructure were asked about their plans. Organizations that expressed no interest in converged infrastructure provided feedback on why it was not a good fit for their organization. Survey Sample 183 professionals participated in the survey, including 84 who have already adopted converged infrastructures within their IT environments and another 81 who were currently considering or planning for it. Just over 18% of respondents represented organizations with employees, another 30% represented organizations with , 12% represented organizations with employees, and just under 40% of respondents represented organizations with employees. Open participation in the survey was encouraged using , the Zenoss blog (blog.zenoss.com), Twitter (@ Zenoss), and other social media outlets. 2

5 The 2014 State of Converged Infrastructure Report Converged infrastructure is a pre-engineered and often pre-assembled pool of compute, storage, and network resources delivered to your datacenter in a ready-to-run configuration. The goal of a converged infrastructure is to minimize compatibility issues and simplify the management of servers, storage systems, and network devices. Based upon the findings of this report, the adoption of converged infrastructure technology stacks has been rapid. This means that if you don t already have converged infrastructure in place in your IT environment, you are likely getting it soon! This study includes insight from organizations that already have converged infrastructure in place, as well as from organizations that are actively considering it. IT decision makers should review these findings to understand the benefits that this new technology is driving and the verticals that have been very receptive to this new approach to IT infrastructure. IT teams, make sure you review the Voice of Experience section that includes words of advice from IT leaders for existing converged infrastructure users. Read on to see what insights your organization can glean from the experiences of your peers. Adoption of Converged Infrastructure The adoption of converged infrastructure continues at a brisk pace. Over 45% of the respondents already have converged infrastructure, which is a significant jump from the 30% adoption rate in the 2013 survey. What is also of interest is that less than 10% of the respondents now say that they have no interest in converged infrastructure. Last year this number was 20%. We believe this could be a result of better appreciation of the value that converged infrastructure brings to an organization. FIGURE 1 CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE ADOPTION RATES Nearly 70% of those in active consideration and/or planning mode expect to begin deployment by By 2017, over 90% of the respondents expect to commence their deployment of converged infrastructure. Who Is Adopting Converged Infrastructure? It was surprising to note that the adoption rate in the finance industry segment has been faster than in the technology industry segment. The reverse held true in the 2013 survey. In our 2013 survey, education came in second for industries 3

6 considering or planning for converged infrastructure. Based upon our new 2014 survey findings, education has started adopting converged infrastructure technology and has now moved up to third place in adoption, behind finance and technology. FIGURE 2 - INDUSTRIES WHO HAVE CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE NOW Technology remains among the top industries considering or planning for converged infrastructure, with finance in second place and manufacturing coming in third. It will be interesting to see how this year works out for these industry segments, and if manufacturing breaks into our top 5 list of converged infrastructure adopters next year. FIGURE 3 - INDUSTRIES CONSIDERING OR PLANNING FOR CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE Why Is Converged Infrastructure Pursued? More efficient provisioning and business agility were the top two reasons for buyers considering converged infrastructure. Interestingly, these two reasons were the top reasons almost regardless of job function. System architects and IT managers were the two job titles that bucked this trend, both picking Faster delivery or additional resources and Lower operating costs ahead of agility and faster provisioning. While it appears everybody else is more focused on the 4

7 big picture, these two job functions are still taking a more pragmatic approach and are focused on what is important to them from their day-to-day perspective. That said, based upon our findings and the customer satisfaction that converged infrastructure is driving, it might be only be a matter of time until these two job functions also join the agility and faster provisioning bandwagon and find lower costs and faster allocation implicit in the driven value. FIGURE 4 - REASONS FOR OWNING CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE FIGURE 5 - REASONS FOR ACTIVELY CONSIDERING OR PLANNING FOR CONVERGEDINFRASTRUCTURE Why Converged Infrastructure Now? What are some of the biggest triggers for the adoption of converged infrastructure? Interestingly, this list is essentially unchanged from last year, with A VMware project leading the way and IaaS, Unified Communication, and Big Data proj- 5

8 ects rounding out the top four. While the frequency of each one in the top five has grown from the previous year, Big Data projects have made significant inroads doubling from 15.9% in the 2013 survey to 29.7% in the 2014 survey. FIGURE 6 INITIATIVES THAT DROVE FIRST ROUND OF CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE ADOPTION Write in responses included: Datacenter consolidation Improving IT security Cloud VMware projects were the projects that drove the first round of converged infrastructure adoption for many organizations. However, for organizations now considering converged infrastructure, this driver is not quite as strong (Figure 7). Only 30.1% of organizations picked a VMware project as one of their choices. Not surprisingly, Big Data continues to move up as an important driver for converged infrastructure purchases. Also of interest here is that IaaS, a very common use case for cloud and converged infrastructure, appears to be dropping in significance as a driver, moving down to number six and getting the nod from less than 17% of the respondents. 6

9 FIGURE 7 - PROJECT TYPES CURRENTLY DRIVING PLANS FOR OR CONSIDERATION OF CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE Write in responses included: NERC CIP Standards Monitoring infrastructure project Why Not Converged Infrastructure? Less than 10% of those surveyed expressed no interest in converged infrastructure. Of those, 41% felt that their current infrastructure was working just fine and didn t see the need to make a change. The second spot was a three-way tie, with converged infrastructure pricing, the need to select best of breed components, and vendor lock-in (all at 23.5%) making the list as the next three reasons for not wanting to move to converged infrastructure. Interestingly, 17.6% of the respondents cited their small size as the reason for not considering converged infrastructure. However, of respondents from companies between employees, 20% already have converged infrastructure, and another 67% are considering it. If this trend holds, the smaller companies might soon become very fertile ground for converged infrastructure vendors. 7

10 FIGURE 8 REASONS FOR NO INTEREST IN CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE What Vendors and Solutions Are Considered and Then Purchased? Selecting a significant piece of infrastructure is not an easy choice, and our respondents went through the same cycles for their converged infrastructure purchase that they did for other technology purchases. Cisco UCS and its derivatives NetApp FlexPod, VCE Vblock, and EMC VSPEX tend to dominate the consideration set. HP converged infrastructure tends to appear in the subset nearly as often as Cisco UCS, while the offerings from Oracle, IBM Pure System, and Dell Active trail the pack. However, it is interesting to note that compared to the numbers from the 2013 survey, each offering is being considered more frequently. For example, Cisco UCS, which was considered 50.3% of the time in 2013, is now in the running 64.6% of the time. Clearly, the awareness for converged infrastructure is growing, as is the scrutiny through which the buyers are putting it before ultimately making a decision. 8

11 FIGURE 9 - SOLUTIONS AND VENDORS CONSIDERED PRIOR TO CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE PURCHASE After going through their evaluation process, the buyers appear to have stayed true to form, with Cisco UCS and its derivatives leading the install base. However, it appears organizations have more than one converged infrastructure stack and are comfortable picking solutions from multiple vendors. FIGURE 10 - SOLUTIONS AND VENDORS CHOSEN BY CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE EARLY ADOPTERS As they consider and plan for a converged infrastructure offering, 47% of the respondents want to build their own stack, making it the number one choice. However, based on what we have seen, the willingness to actually build it tends to drop significantly as these organizations go through the process. Based upon the responses from the install base, it appears only 22% of organizations actually did the rack-and-stack themselves. Others went with one of the many existing vendor solutions available. 9

12 FIGURE 11 CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE SOLUTIONS AND VENDORS BEING ACTIVELY CONSIDERED OR PLANNED FOR Write in responses included: Hitachi Nutanix SimpliVity After the Decision: Living with Converged Infrastructure This survey s early adopters of converged infrastructure have been living with it for an average of around 3 years. Generally, they are achieving very positive results, with 73.3% reporting better customer satisfaction. Only 1.3% of the respondents blamed their converged infrastructure for worse customer satisfaction. However, achieving success clearly requires more than a pure hardware purchase respondents cited converged staffing and converged management tools as primary needs as well. FIGURE 12 CUSTOMER SATISFACTION OF EARLY ADOPTERS 10

13 As expected, organizations with employees accounted for 60% of converged infrastructure installations with 65+ blades. However, they also consumed smaller configurations, which may be because of branch/remote office use, a common use case for converged infrastructure. FIGURE 13 - BLADE COUNT OF EARLY ADOPTERS CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURES Staffing for Converged Infrastructure Among firms with converged infrastructure in place, almost 60% report that the server team is responsible for performance of the converged infrastructure, closely followed by the virtualization team. Of note was that multiple IT managers picked New Converged Infrastructure Team as the team that would ultimately have the responsibility, but almost nobody else made that choice. While that might be the way it eventually shapes up, it does not look imminent at this point. FIGURE 14 - HOW EARLY ADOPTERS ARE ASSIGNING STAFF RESOURCES TO CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE 11

14 When you look at the organizations that are considering or planning converged infrastructure, the situation is a bit different. Even though the New Converged Infrastructure team has only moved up one spot, going past the storage team in the process, it is significant to note that there is across-the-board support for it, from upper management all the way to system architects. It remains to be seen if this is a result of extensive planning activities or the shape of things to come. We will keep you posted! FIGURE 15 - STAFFING PLANS FOR THOSE CONSIDERING OR PLANNING FOR CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE Overall, organizations that have adopted converged infrastructure appear to be mostly satisfied with their converged infrastructure staffing decisions. However, given that the organizational responsibilities are still being worked, it will be interesting to see how the accountability shifts over time and where staffing decisions eventually land. FIGURE 16 - STAFFING SATISFACTION AMONG THOSE LIVING WITH CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE 12

15 Customer Comments Extremely good fit for my needs. Multiple responses Strong technical support. IT Manager, Central or South America The structure performs well. However it would be a plus to have someone dedicated solely to converged infrastructure. IT Director, North America We have not broken down traditional silos yet. Systems Architect, North America and IT Auditor, Multi-National Project was initially budgeted to get initial project up and running. Now we are maintaining those applications originally built, AND taking on new projects with same staffing levels. IT Manager, North America Approach to Orchestration and Provisioning For the second year in a row, VMware vcloud ranks at the top of the list of orchestration tools being used with converged infrastructure. With VMware projects the number one reason for converged infrastructure adoption, this is hardly surprising. However, Puppet Labs is quickly gaining in popularity, moving up two spots and settling in the number two spot ahead of homegrown scripts. Of course, organizations continue to leverage homegrown scripts to realize capabilities that are not readily available in existing commercial or open source offerings. Cloupia and Cisco CIAC account for the other entrants in the top five. FIGURE 17 - ORCHESTRATION AND PROVISIONING CHOICES OF EARLY ADOPTERS OF CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE Among those considering converged infrastructure, OpenStack and Cisco CIAC appear to be getting significant traction, moving up to second and third place respectively. The thought of homegrown scripts is not very high on minds presently, but this might change as organizations go through their deployment and uncover areas that do require custom development. 13

16 FIGURE 18 - HOW THOSE ACTIVELY CONSIDERING CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN TO ORCHESTRATE & PROVISION IT SERVICES Performance and Availability Management While IT teams are taking a big step forward in upgrading their IT infrastructure through the use of state-of-the-art technology stacks, it is interesting to note that they are not doing the same with their monitoring tools. 50% of respondents are managing the performance and availability of their converged infrastructure using multiple tools that they already own. Another 34% talked about getting multiple tools from the converged infrastructure vendor. In fact, over 55% of respondents said they were using four or more tools to manage the availability and performance of their converged infrastructure, with 29% juggling more than seven tools. We believe this is a huge miss on the part of IT organizations. Study after study 1 show how having too many tools can slow down root cause analysis, increase management overhead, and reduce overall IT Operations productivity. FIGURE 19 - HOW CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE S EARLY ADOPTERS MANAGE PERFORMANCE & AVAILABILITY OF IT SERVICES 1 According to a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting on behalf Zenoss, How Too Many Tools Can Impact Your IT Operation Efficiency, published January See the True Cost of IT Monitoring Calculator from Zenoss for additional details. 14

17 Customer Comments Invest up front to get a unified management view of your infrastructure - it is nigh impossible to integrate multiple element managers and none of the vendor specific products can do it all. CIO/Upper Management, Multi-National Element management tools did not offer the broad view of services deployed across multiple infrastructures. CIO/ Upper Management, Multi-national Nothing is every perfect, one tool will never do everything. An enterprise environment from our customer is also not 10 servers like it would be in 2000, it s 2014 and most of our customers have servers in their enterprise. IT Manager, Multi-National Zenoss appears to have excellent capabilities for UCS and VMware, but we must redeploy in order to be manageable. Systems Architect, North America The tools we use have been very dependable IT Director, North America Want to get the custom vendor tool to play nice with our main tool - Zenoss Resource Manager IT Director, North America I feel that performance can always be improved. There is no single turnkey solution for understanding what troubles our provisioning solution, etc. and we have to use multiple tools to understand exactly what is giving us problems within the big picture. IT Consultant, Multi-National Nothing seems to be single pane, but at least there s a sense of control and order around the existing tool stack IT Manager, North America FIGURE 20 - HOW THOSE ACTIVELY CONSIDERING OR PLANNING CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN TO MANAGE PERFORMANCE & AVAILABILITY Improved Productivity Despite the perceived complexity, early adopters of converged infrastructure report improved productivity within the datacenter, with over 78% pointing to a faster MTTR versus 2.3% who reported that that MTTR times actually got worse. 15

18 FIGURE 21- CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE S EARLY ADOPTERS BENEFITTING FROM IMPROVED PRODUCTIVITY Voices of Experience: Advice from Early Adopters Finally, some insight and words of wisdom from organizations that are already using converged infrastructure: Converged Infrastructure User Comments Product flexibility and configurability is very good. Multiple responses Much easier to manage; easier to maintain. Life is getting easier after we ve got more acquainted w/ the systems. Network Engineer, North America Helps us make better use of real-time data. IT Manager, North America Faster delivery of additional resources. Systems Architect, North America We don t have any complaints at this time IT Director, North America Can provision apps in minutes with instant HA Sales, Europe or Russia We have a demonstrated improvement from what we experienced prior to implementation. IT Director, North America We have been provided a great deal of agility and SLAs have been solid. No complaints! IT Manager, North America Reduction in numbers, simpler SLA s, and easier provisioning IT Director, Europe or Russia Have seen it work well without any problems since it was installed Executive, North America We have recently undergone a global restructure based on converged infrastructure being our core business. Our company is a much better place to work since this happened and our customers are getting a better level of service as we can focus on their needs and ideas. IT Manager, Multi-National Converged Infrastructure User Advice Relied on vendor advice too much during the design phase and missed several key opportunities, requiring a great deal of rework and redeployment. Systems Architect, North America Less complex and more automated infrastructure, has reduced staff labor, training, time to deploy and scale infrastructure. Technology Sales, North America 16

19 Sometimes, clients do not fully accept and understand converged infrastructure, and do not fully embrace the possibilities without a lot of pushing from our end. IT Consultant, North America Deployment is key. Maintaining the environment isn t nearly as difficult as the initial deployment and design. IT Network Engineer, North America We invested a lot in training and making sure everyone knew how we work with this. We made sure the culture is adapted to the new reality Software Engineer, Multi-National organization Evaluate the tool sets more than the hardware or infrastructure that layer of abstraction is by far more important to a successful CI implementation than any amount of hardware IT Manager, North America Use a single set of tools to get gain a true picture of that the environment looks like. System Administrator, North America Do research and seek out others who have already gone through the process for best practices. IT Director, North America Plan, plan, plan, and then train System Architect, North America Planning, training, and process development are important and should not be underestimated or overlooked. System Architect, North America Final Word Organizations that have adopted converged infrastructure do appear to be benefitting from it in terms of better customer service, improved MTTR, and also in terms of the agility and speed that converged infrastructure brings to the organization. As more and more verticals begin to adopt converged infrastructure, it will quickly become mainstream, and concerns surrounding vendor lock-in and the need for best-of-breed tools will go away. We do, however, believe that organizations that have already adopted converged infrastructure or are currently considering converged infrastructure must also look at supporting unified tools. Without proper tools in place, converged infrastructure will fail to deliver the promised value. As our friend from a multi-national organization put it - Invest up front to get a unified management view of your infrastructure - it is nigh impossible to integrate multiple element managers and none of the vendor specific products can do it all. CIO/Upper Management, Multi-National We hope this report has been as informative to you and your staff as it has been to the team here at Zenoss! 17

20 Demographics of Survey Respondents FIGURE 22 SURVEY PARTICIPANTS ORGANIZATIONS SIZES FIGURE 23 SURVEY PARTICIPANTS JOB TITLES OR ROLES Other write-in roles included Chief Architect, Project Engineer, Network Architect, IT Consultant, Security Officer, and more. 18

21 FIGURE 24 SURVEY PARTICIPANTS INDUSTRIES FIGURE 25 SURVEY PARTICIPANTS GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION Four Points Drive Building 1, Suite 300 Austin, TX 78726, USA Phone: Toll-free: Zenoss and the Zenoss logo are trademarks, or service marks of Zenoss, Inc. All other trademarks listed in this document are the property of their respective owners.