Hyperconverged Infrastructure

"Enterprise IT teams today are looking for ways to deliver on-premises IT services with the speed and operational efficiency of public cloud services such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. A comprehensive enterprise cloud platform bridges the gap between traditional infrastructure and public cloud services – and hyperconvergence is at the core of an enterprise or hybrid cloud infrastructure."

On-premise infrastructure provides greater control. Public cloud provides greater speed and operational efficiency.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure provides the best of both worlds.

Legacy datacenters consist of separate servers, storage networks and storage arrays. Each infrastructure building block works in a separate silo, needs to be controlled by its own management software and requires dedicated resources. The 3-tier architecture helped infrastructure teams update individual modules without affecting layers amidst the explosion of the web in the 1990s.

But this architecture can’t keep up with IT needs in the current era of hybrid IT. It’s complex, unwieldy, doesn’t provide a firm foundation for DevOps, and can’t scale with the magnitude it used to.

Today, HCI is the infrastructure of choice for companies that want to stay competitive, drive innovation and agility, and ensure that their datacenters are cloud-ready.

HCI converges the entire datacenter stack, including compute, storage, networking, and virtualization. Complex and expensive legacy infrastructure is replaced by a platform running on turnkey, industry-standard servers that enable enterprises to start small and scale one node at a time. Software running on each server node distributes all operating functions across the cluster for superior performance and resilience. In this manner, HCI enables enterprises to create a cloudlike provisioning model while maintaining physical control of IT assets and data on-premises in the data center, remote site or branch office.

That said, HCI adoption is fueled by more than JUST "hybrid cloud enablement" and is gradually expanding to enabling edge environments, AI-based operations and secondary storage in HCI environments.