The hyperconverged integrated systems (HCIS) market will be worth almost $5 billion in 2019, making 24% of the overall integrated systems market, Gartner reports-- meaning it is well on the way to reach mainstream status over the next 5 years.

Gartner defines HCIS as a platform offering shared compute and storage resources, based on software-defined storage, software-defined compute, commodity hardware and a unified management interface. Hyperconverged systems deliver main value through software tools, commoditising underlying hardware. The analyst also points that while the overall integrated market continues to grow, HCIS will cannibalise from other segments.

"We are on the cusp of a 3rd phase of integrated systems," Gartner continues. "This evolution presents IT infrastructure and operations leaders with a framework to evolve their implementations and architectures."

But what about the 1st and 2nd phases? The 1st phase is the peak period of blade systems (2005 to 2015), while the 2nd phase comes with the arrival of converged infrastructures and the advent of HCIS for specific use cases (2010-2020). The 3rd phase represents continuous application and microservices delivery on HCIS platforms (2016-2025), with the delivery of dynamic, composable and fabric-based infrastructures.

Currently HCIS use cases are limited, causing silos with existing infrastructure. As such, its progression depends on multiple hardware and software advances, such as networking and software-defined enterprises. Ultimately, Gartner predicts, the underlying infrastructure will disappear. Instead it will become a malleable utility under the control of software intelligence and automated to enable IT as a service (ITaaS).

"HCIS is not a destination, but an evolutionary journey," the analyst concludes. "While we fully expect the use cases to embrace mission-critical applications in the future, current implementations could still pose constraints on rapid growth toward the end of the decade."

Go Gartner Says Hyperconverged Integrated Systems Will Be Mainstream in 5 Years