Is hyperconverged infrastructure a cloud alternative for server huggers? It’s interesting that all the benefits listed with hyperconverged infrastructure are the same benefits that cloud providers like Expedient have been providing to customers every day for the last 8 years. And the cloud services alternative removes the troubles associated with owning and operating your own hardware and data centers. So where is the value?
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is all about getting “out of the infrastructure business”, and focus on the business – just like Converged Infrastructure (CI). But, HCI is different from CI in several important ways:
You can start smaller. Much smaller.
You scale in smaller increments – which “de-risks” sizing small, and growing as workloads get added (and thus adding only what you need). This is fundamentally different economic curve.
It’s operationally simpler. Much simpler.
In our experience, a conservative observations is that HCI generally has about a lower capital cost than CI, but more importantly a big improvement (2x lower) operational/administrative operational cost. This is particularly impactful as there is no “migration event”, you can add/update/remove nodes and capacity easily and non-disruptively.
Like anything that is growing fast, there’s no doubt a bit of a hype-cycle around HCI – and at my last count 28 startups (I wager we will see HCI startup armageddon in 2017 – it’s just not sustainable… any takers?)
More of the Virtual Geek post
