HCI one of the most rapidly growing technology: Rajesh Ramnani

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Saurabh Gupta | 09 Aug, 2016
Enterprises in India across verticals and sizes are experiencing data explosion. The Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions from EMC provide a simple, cost effective solution for a wide variety of applications and workloads, said Rajesh Ramnani, Director at VCE, (Virtual Computing Environment), the converged platforms division of EMC.

In an email interview to SME Times, he said, "HCI is one of the most preferred methods for deploying Information Technology (IT) in the data center, as IT departments seek ways to adjust to their new role in business and new responsibilities entrusted on them. It helps in simplifying and expediting the delivery of application workloads."

Excerpts from the interview...

Please tell the current state of hyper-converged infrastructure in India and how do you foresee its growth?
Rajesh Ramnani: Hyper-converged infrastructure is one of the most rapidly growing technologies globally and India is no exception. It is promising to dramatically shift the way infrastructure is procured, deployed and managed. Market potential in India for Hyper-Converged solutions can exceed USD 15Mn in FY 2016 itself, of which 50% will be in Midmarket and rest will be in large enterprises and corporates.

Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) has gained notable traction in India. It is one of the most preferred methods for deploying IT in the data center, as IT departments seek ways to adjust to their new role in business and new responsibilities entrusted on them. It helps in simplifying and expediting the delivery of application workloads. HCI market is growing at 60% YoY, as per analysts expected to touch USD 4Bn+ by 2020. According to Gartner it is expected to become a $5 billion market by 2019; thereby becoming the category leader by revenue in pre-integrated full-stack infrastructure products.

What are the current trends in the hyper-converged infrastructure domain?
Rajesh Ramnani: Hyper-converged infrastructure is gaining significant acceptance across enterprises of all sizes. It is an answer to the organizations looking for cost efficient, simple, flexible and scalable IT infrastructure in this digital world. It helps in the creation of virtual data center by consolidating key IT components.

a. The converged infrastructure market has witnessed notable traction in India over the last few years. Organisations across verticals are moving from the traditional ‘build-it-yourself’ infrastructure to converged ‘ready-to-use’ infrastructure that is simple, scalable, secure and cost efficient. According to Converged IT infrastructure survey sponsored by VCE, IT departments will spend $14.3 billion on converged infrastructure by 2018, a 27 percent increase from the $10.2 billion that they spent in 2015.

b. Converged Infrastructure is being widely adopted by all organizations considering “Buying” ready solutions rather than “Building” their own. On Hyper Converged Front we have seen increased traction from IT/ITES, Telecom organizations and Service providers creating their public cloud platforms as well as Mid-Market enterprises who want hassle free simple to use and deploy infrastructure.

Please tell more the new products announced by EMC - VxRail and VxRack and its benefits.
Rajesh Ramnani: VxRail Appliance family is the only integrated and jointly engineered hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) for VMware environments. VxRail Appliances provide a simple, cost effective hyper-converged infrastructure solution for a wide variety of applications and workloads. The jointly engineered VxRail Appliances tightly integrate virtualization, compute, storage and data protection in one system with a single point of support. With VxRail Appliances, IT organizations can start small and easily scale capacity and performance by nondisruptively adding appliances to the cluster without the investment or up-front planning required with traditional infrastructure. By fully leveraging VMware’s hyper-converged software, the VxRail Appliance seamlessly integrates into customers' existing VMware vSphere environments, workflows, and tools. The appliances are fully loaded with integrated EMC mission-critical data services including replication, backup and cloud tiering at no additional charge. VxRail Appliances integrate seamlessly into the VCE racks – blocks – appliances continuum to simplify scale across the enterprise.
The recently launched VxRack system 1000 series, a new hyper-converged offering that complements VCE converged infrastructure systems. VxRack system 1000 series is a self-contained units of servers and networking are well suited for use cases that require a highly scalable infrastructure. It has a flexible, modular design that meets the scalability, performance, and efficiency requirements of modern data centers. IT organizations that are moving toward a software-defined architecture can utilize the VxRack 1000 for a diverse set of use cases, especially in situations where application growth is unpredictable. Some of the key benefits of VxRack system 1000 series includes -

Agility - Integrated compute, network, and storage in a modular system, not discrete hyper-converged units.
Unparalleled Performance - Experience performance that scales linearly as you expand.
Scale as you Grow - Start with a minimal number of nodes and rapidly scale to hundreds or thousands of nodes as needed.
Flexible Configurations - Add compute enclosures with various CPU, memory, and storage options to meet specific application or workload requirements.
Unified Management - Simplified operations and management through integrated provisioning, configuration, and a unique management toolset from VCE.
Data Protection Options to integrate EMC Avamar, EMC Data Domain, EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines.

EMC is the world's largest provider of data storage systems by market share, who are EMC's target markets in India?
Rajesh Ramnani: With the growth of data volumes, grows the Storage capacities. Last year the Storage market witnessed good traction and signed out with significant growth in India. Storage modernization and consolidation, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery are some of the key drivers of this market, and they are likely to remain relevant drivers for the industry. We are not targeting any particular market. Enterprises in India across verticals and sizes are experiencing data explosion. Hence, India as a market is crucial for us.

How do you see the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector in India? What specific EMC have for this sector?
Rajesh Ramnani: Small is the new big. SMEs are the backbone of the economy. Governments focus on ‘Make in India’, reemphasizes on the importance of SMEs in the Indian economy.
SME sector is an important market for us as well. We recently launched VxRail and VxRack that is simple, flexible and scalable, thereby allowing the SMEs to leverage the advanced technology to expand and improve their business.

How SMEs can be benefited from your new products?
Rajesh Ramnani: The hyper-converged infrastructure solutions from EMC - VxRail Appliances and VxRack provide a simple, cost effective solution for a wide variety of applications and workloads. With VxRail Appliances, IT organizations can start small and easily scale capacity and performance by non-disruptively adding appliances to the cluster without the investment or up-front planning required with traditional infrastructure. The feature of ‘scale as you grow’ in VxRack helps the SMEs to invest on what they use and scale out as their business grows.

How will the app developers community benefit from VxRack with Neutrino nodes?
Rajesh Ramnani: In today's dynamically changing digital economy, rapid application development and shortened release cycles are the new normal. DevOps, leveraging continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and a more integrated operating model and culture between developers and IT, can provide a competitive edge, but shifting to DevOps is difficult without the right development platform and tools. Cloud-native platforms address this need. Cloud-native refers to a new software architecture that enables agile application development that follows cloud-native principles, a shift toward microservices versus monolithic app stacks, and embraces container infrastructure abstraction models.

How you see 'Digital India' movement? What are EMC's plans to help transform India digitally?
Rajesh Ramnani: India is encouraging innovation at every sphere. The best example is Digital India campaign which is focused on IT innovation by considering development on “Open Source” technologies rather than buying licensed software’s.

The above initiative is so serious that the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology released a new policy in March 2015 that makes it mandatory for all e-government systems to be deployed on open source software.

The emphasis on open source by the GOI is a reflection of this change of focus. IT is less about acquiring intellectual property via a license, and more about widely distributing the tools and adding value on top of it.

Not only the Government, but enterprises and Public sector entities across India are seriously considering Open Source, both from Innovation and Optimizing cost perspective. Use case extends from developing applications to high performance computing. Premier Education Institutions across the country use Open Source as means for development, this confirms that the future is Open-Source, and the adoption is going to increase multifold in coming years.

For an urban center to transform into future-proof robust Smart City it needs a strong ICT foundation that give it an agile, flexible and cost effective software-defined infrastructure forming the basis of the Smart City Cloud for faster provisioning of additional on-demand citizen services. This requires massive infrastructure at the end points in term of digital cameras and surveillance devices. However the information is required to be processed by a stable infrastructure at the back-end.

The real challenge however is not just stable infrastructure, but also solution which is scalable as well as completely manufactured, supported and managed by single vendor. Neutrino from EMC is the answer to all the above issues. With Neutrino we now have a ready product which can be leveraged not only for India Government initiatives but also for all enterprises and Educations institutions considering Open Source, as platform of choice.