The 2023 Gartner Hype Cycle for Compute highlights an important set of trends in compute hardware: enterprises are adopting exciting innovations, which have higher power, cooling, and energy requirements. Therefore, advancements in efficiency, cost management, and increasing the value of existing resources will be needed to enable those innovations to be practically adopted.
Compute Innovations Driving the Need for Efficiency
The Gartner report highlights a few primary technologies: accelerators, AI clusters, quantum computing, Compute Express Link, and a need for higher-bandwidth, lower-jitter, low tail latency networks.
There are several factors at play here. The rate of increase is slowing for CPU performance, pushing leaders to invest in other areas to keep improving performance. This has led to increased attention on accelerators, including GPUs for generative AI, which require advanced interconnects like Compute Express Link. Compute Express Link is an open standard for CPU to device and CPU to memory connections, enabling higher speeds and capacity for high performance data center infrastructure.
In addition, recent advances in AI and the push for accelerated AI development require changes to compute hardware architecture, including new server designs, higher bandwidth, and the need for function accelerator cards (FACs).
To enable these high-impact, forward looking innovations, enterprise organizations must invest in efficiency for energy consumption and costs, increasing the value gained from existing resources.
What Efficiency Looks Like
According to Gartner, “by 2027, 75% of organizations will implement a sustainability program to optimize costs and respond to pressure from stakeholders.” This is up from just 10% in 2023.
As a result, the Hype Cycle identifies the 25 “most-hyped innovations in the compute market” for leaders to optimize investments and prepare their hardware for adopting exciting new innovations like AI.
One of the most important of these innovations is infrastructure orchestration — the ability to design, deliver, and operate services across all infrastructure, whether it’s on-premises, on the cloud, or at the edge. Gartner names Itential as one of the key vendors for this space, and the report rates it as a ‘High’ potential benefit.
The importance of infrastructure orchestration comes with the need to adopt new technologies, to expand and distribute infrastructure and compute hardware across different environments. Gartner lists “cost optimization” and “value extraction” along with “infrastructure complexity” as key business drivers for the adoption of infrastructure orchestration techniques. Essentially, successful infrastructure orchestration is about “templated service creation and management” that spans all services across distributed infrastructure, ultimately “improving the velocity and quality of infrastructure services and improving traceability and visibility of service delivery.”
Organizations that successfully adopt infrastructure orchestration will see their I&O teams able to effectively operate across all their infrastructure equally. That drives business agility and flexibility. It’s a vital piece of getting as much value as possible out of existing compute hardware, helping to free up budget, energy, and physical space for what’s needed to enable the advanced innovations leaders are looking to adopt.
Why I&O Leaders Must Adopt Infrastructure Orchestration
The Gartner report also provides key recommendations and common blockers for leaders looking to invest in infrastructure orchestration.
One of the most significant blockers is skill development within infrastructure teams. Sometimes, the practices and tools required for infrastructure orchestration require skills beyond scripting, so it’s important to select a solution that helps bypass this challenge, or to invest heavily in training and reskilling.
In addition, the current state of many I&O teams organizationally can make it difficult to orchestrate infrastructure across different domains. A siloed operating model may provide “perceptions of stability and reliability,” but this ultimately slows adoption.
The last major obstacle mentioned in the report is the level of automation maturity an organization has reached. Orchestrating automated processes across complex, distributed infrastructure requires certain automation capabilities first, so teams must invest in the appropriate solutions.
Leaders who successfully navigate those challenges can expect to see significant returns from investing in infrastructure orchestration, especially if they follow these recommendations laid out in the Gartner report:
User Recommendations
- “Identify and catalog use cases and constraints in your delivery workflows that are injecting delay into service delivery, especially for tasks that are executed manually.
- Benchmark existing service delivery execution time and quality problems to measure against to demonstrate improvement.
- Catalog operational tasks that are being executed manually today and are candidates to develop workflows to implement.
- Identify candidate orchestration platforms to execute proof of value testing with, ensuring that the candidates can be integrated into your existing operational environment.
- Monitor implementation to identify successes and opportunities for improvement and build a success story demonstrating velocity, quality, throughput and operational improvements.“
The central focus of infrastructure orchestration is efficiency. Efficiency across infrastructure that’s becoming more and more complicated. As organizations chase key advancements in compute hardware, it’s equally important to invest in the supporting technologies and organizational practices that support those innovations. Otherwise, leaders risk facing high costs, untenable energy consumption, or a lack of impact from the innovations they adopt.
To dive deeper into the future of compute hardware and to learn about the 24 other innovations that will help support advancements like generative AI and quantum computing, read the full Gartner report: The Hype Cycle for Compute, 2023.
Kristen H. Rachels
Chief Marketing Officer ‐ Itential
Kristen serves as Chief Marketing Officer for Itential, leading their go-to-market strategy and execution to accelerate the adoption and expansion of the company’s products and services.
