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Neuralytix has been interested in the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market from its inception. We define HCI as a scalable software-defined architecture that integrates compute, storage, networking, security, virtualization, and management resources in a single commodity common-off-the-shelf (COTS) server supported by a single vendor. HCI scales from a single node to multiple nodes with minimal administrator intervention and the resulting cluster resources are then pooled and available to authorized users.

However, HCI represents only one approach to software-defined datacenters (SDDC). New architectures, especially composable infrastructure, will begin to have a meaningful impact on the number of datacenter builds that will leverage SDDC design.

We believe that the SDDC approach to datacenter architecture will represent the majority of datacenter deployments through 2021. Our current forecast (January 1, 2017) are represented in Figure 1 below. As the forecast suggests, the penetration of SDDC (in particular, HCI) will remain relatively low through 2019. At that point, the inflexion dramatically increases.

Figure 1: % of datacenter installations that will use SDDC architectures (Neuralytix 2017)

Our assumption is that by 2019, many datacenters that held off on the use of SDDC architectures in 2013-2016 due to its relative immaturity will be due for refresh, and given its stability, flexibility, and cost effectiveness, will adopt the new architecture, representing the sharp increase in adoption through 2021.

As part of our predictions for 2017, Neuralytix expects a high number of mergers and acquisitions to take place. Part of the basis for our prediction is that many server vendors are aligning their resources for the transition from traditional datacenter architectures to software-defined datacenter architecture to become the dominant deployment.