Although many companies have rushed to the cloud to support a new remote workforce, hardware remains the largest category of IT spending, according to Spiceworks Ziff Davis (SWZD), a division of Ziff Davis, which has published his new Material trends in 2022 and beyond report, providing information on the status of server and client computing devices.
The survey results show that physical servers will continue to evolve to eventually coexist and integrate with public clouds, enabling greater portability and flexibility that will benefit organizations in an increasingly hybrid world.
To facilitate a holistic view of the current and future state of hardware technology, SWZD has combined historical IT spending and adoption data with their hardware-focused State of Computing 2022 research. This global survey gathered information from more than 1,000 IT professionals at companies in North America and Europe.
Speaking to CXOToday, Peter Tsai, Chief Technology Officer at Spiceworks Ziff Davis, said, “In 2022, enterprises will modernize IT infrastructure and update client devices to support the workforce in our world. increasingly hybrid.
“Driven by the shift to remote working that favors portable computing devices, companies expect to spend significantly more on laptops than desktops – 19% of hardware budgets versus 14%, respectively,” he said. he declares.
The results show that the use of AMD processors is poised to grow: within two years, enterprise adoption of AMD is expected to reach 60% for PCs and 44% for servers. Additionally, storage acceleration trends continue: more than two-thirds (68%) of enterprises (500+ employees) plan to adopt all-flash storage arrays within the next two years.
The pay-as-you-go cloud model is becoming increasingly popular on-premises. More than half (57%) of enterprises plan to adopt consumption-based infrastructure by the end of 2023. Additionally, adoption of ARM server processors is poised to double from 11% of businesses currently at 22% over the next two years.
“As organizations acquire new laptops to accommodate employees who will be working from home, they will be more willing to look beyond the Intel + Windows architecture that has dominated for decades. SWZD’s Hardware Trends Report for 2022 and Beyond shows significant growth in adoption of AMD, Apple, and ARM processors. Within two years, 60% of enterprises plan to use AMD processors in customer devices and 37% will use Apple’s M1 chips,” Tsai said.
“In server rooms around the world, on-premises infrastructure will evolve offering better performance and becoming more closely tied to public clouds. For example, fast solid-state drives continue to gain traction as enterprises seek to reduce storage bottlenecks associated with legacy hard drives. Already, 55% of enterprises use SATA SSDs in on-premises servers. Within two years, most IT departments plan to equip servers with even faster flash storage in the form of SAS SSDs (56%) and even faster NVMe SSDs (53%),” said he added.
Going forward, enterprises will continue to invest in on-premises infrastructure, as evidenced by the ongoing evolution in server rooms around the world, according to the report. For example, 56% of enterprises have adopted integrated remote management (eg, Dell’s iDRAC, HPE iLO technologies) — which can help IT professionals manage servers from anywhere.
Most organizations (55%) also have fault tolerance/failover capabilities in place, often implemented through virtualization and hyperconverged systems, which enable business continuity in the event of hardware failure.
Consumption-based billing has made its way to server rooms – instead of buying their hardware outright, companies can now opt for “as a service” billing for on-premises infrastructure. Several hardware manufacturers offer solutions designed with cloud integration in mind to pull on-premises and cloud payment models in alignment with technology stacks. Today, 25% of organizations use this consumption-based infrastructure technology, with that figure rising to 39% among enterprises (500+ employees).
Storage infrastructure also continues to evolve as businesses turn to once inaccessible technologies, such as fast flash memory, instead of traditional spinning hard drives. For example, 24% of enterprises are using all-flash storage arrays today and an additional 20% plan to do so by the end of 2023.
Adoption of external all-flash storage arrays is growing rapidly in large enterprises. Only 14% of the smallest companies (1-99 employees) currently use all-flash storage, compared to 39% of companies. Beyond the server room, end-user hardware adoption is also changing: Today’s pandemic-induced remote work climate requires portability that traditional desktop computers cannot offer. SWZD’s State of IT 2022 report shows that around 40% of employees use laptops and 40% use desktops.
“As more and more workloads run in AWS or Azure to support remote workforces, on-premises infrastructure will evolve to integrate more seamlessly with public clouds, providing organizations more resiliency and the flexibility to run workloads where it makes the most sense. SWZD’s report on hardware trends in 2022 and beyond indicates that within two years, most enterprises (54%) will integrate physical servers with a public cloud. More than a third of enterprises (37%) will go further by using consumption-based billing-as-a-service, which simplifies the creation of hybrid clouds by aligning technology stacks and enabling the cloud payment model in place. premises infrastructure,” Tsai said.
As enterprises adapt more to a hybrid future, their technology stacks will continue to evolve as IT departments seek out capabilities to drive their business forward, according to the study.
