IT infrastructures are changing at a rapid pace. As technology professionals contend with many of the challenges inherent to hybrid IT environments, they may also find themselves faced with whether to adopt a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) or cloud as an enabler of modernized environments. This alternative approach to public or private cloud deployments combines compute, storage, and networking in a single system and can come from a single vendor or be hardware agnostic.
A couple of key developments have made HCI more appealing for more workloads. One is the ability to independently scale compute and storage capacity via a disaggregated model. The other is the ability to create a hyperconverged solution using NVMe — an open logical device interface specification for accessing nonvolatile storage media attached via a PCI Express bus — over fabrics.