Mid-market opportunity ripe for hyperconvergence, says Analyst study

Small to mid-sized companies struggle with storage complexity, data centre complexity, cost, and time investments, according to the 2015 State of SMB IT Infrastructure Survey, conducted by ActualTech Media.

Nearly 600 technology professionals from organisations with fewer than 500 employees responded to the survey, conducted from March 11th to March 25th by ActualTech Media principals Scott Lowe and David Davis for sponsor Scale Computing, the leading Mid-market provider of hyperconverged solutions combining storage, servers, virtualisation, and management.

Scaling the infrastructure – both servers/compute and storage – remains a challenge for 34 per cent of respondents, and 24 percent cited infrastructure concerns including managing complexity, troubleshooting, and keeping infrastructure current.

The study showed wide variety in the degree to which SMBs have rolled out virtualisation. There was an even split among respondents, with 50 per cent reporting that half or more of their servers are virtualised, and the other 50 per cent saying less than half are. ActualTech Media credits this to it being widely known that not every workload is easily virtualized, and reluctance to move their mission critical applications to such environments. 50 percent of respondents also reported that they had dedicated less than 10 TB to server virtualisation.

VMware vSphere is the most popular hypervisor in place, with 46 percent, followed by Microsoft Hyper-V at 25 per cent, and all others combined representing 29 per cent.

"We believe that this data indicates an opportunity for SMB-focused infrastructure and hyperconvergence vendors to serve these customers and to make a significant impact when it comes to improving their operational efficiency," said Scott Lowe, Co-founder of ActualTech Media. "This also presents an opportunity for education of this market, and helping SMB customers better understand that most of their workloads would be well supported with modern hypervisors and related tools."

"We know SMBs are adopting virtualisation to keep their infrastructures up to date, but questions about the current state from which they are evolving, what they are using, what challenges they have, and what they're spending are too rarely asked of this important and diverse market segment," said Jeff Ready, CEO of Scale Computing. "We leaped at the chance to work with ActualTech Media on this survey, which offers the most comprehensive information currently available on the needs of small to mid-sized companies."

In addition to market studies, ActualTech Media services include custom whitepapers, webinars, videos, product reviews and more. 

Scale Computing's HC3 systems are designed to provide high availability, scalability and simplicity for SMB environments. The HC3 platform brings storage, servers, virtualisation, and management together in a single, comprehensive system. With no virtualisation software to license and no external storage to buy, HC3 products lower out-of-pocket costs and radically simplify the infrastructure needed to keep applications running. HC3 products make the deployment and management of a highly available and scalable infrastructure as easy to manage as a single server.