What hyper-converged storage really means for you

To paraphrase an old joke, ask three IT “experts” for a definition of hyper-convergence and you'll get four different answers - depending on which areas they work in and what their employers are currently trying to sell. We are going to simplify things though by looking at it through the prism of storage. This turns out to be …

[Ashton Black]

Tell me if I'm wrong...

Does Hyper-Convergence mean this:

Instead of buying several low storage, but high CPU/core count servers for the hypervisor to sit on and then having a separate SAN fabric to provide storage. You would buy several high storage, high CPU servers and let the hyper-convergence appliance allocate resources based on a pool of those servers?

I can see the advantage of having a SAN-less network, simplicity. But is this just good for start-ups or new builds?

If anyone has any decent guides (The Wiki entry is not much help) I'd appreciate a link.

[thegreatsatan]

Too much hype

Far too much hype around the hyper converged market. The reality is that yes if you are a greenfield customer or someone with a small number of VM's in your environment (say sub 500) then HCI is a good fit, but the reality is, the inability to independently scale compute and storage will always leave gaps. Some customers are ok with that, think shops with 5 total IT people, also think large orgs who have very specific projects that they want hardware isolation, thats where its a good fit. But, HCI will never replace core infrastructure for sophisticated customers, anyone who still has bare metal workloads won't be able to use it, anyone who operates at legitimate scale won't use it either (they already have been building their own HCI solutions) and the price point for a HCI platform is ludicrously expensive.

TL:DR works great for specific use cases (think VDI mostly) and small customers with unsophisticated environments. Everyone else will go the converged infrastructure route.

[Henry Wertz 1]

Depends on requirements

I figure it may be a matter of preference and requirements.

A well-designed distributed filesystem can do a fine job of making sure you have redundancy to keep your files safe (edit: from hardware failures. MAKE BACKUPS!!), while letting you use whatever disks to provide your storage pool. If your storage requirements go up rather in line with compute requirements, this seems like a nice solution.

But, if you're organizational setup favors having seperate groups admin the systems and a group taking care of the storage and backups, then a SAN seems like the way to go. If you have unusually high storage requirements then you'll want a SAN.