Hyperconverged vs.

Converged
vs. Traditional IT Infrastructure
What are the Key Differences? Which Option is Right for You?

By ActualTech Media

What are the differences between traditional IT infrastructure, Converged CONTENTS

Infrastructure (CI), and Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)? More than
Traditional IT 2


just a set of pros and cons, what are the fuzzy grey areas in between and
Converged Infrastructure 3


overlapping these three approaches to IT infrastructure?
Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) 3


The Internet is littered with comparisons between traditional IT, CI, and
HCI. They all have a bias. Someone is trying to sell you something, or The Overlap 4
they are trying to defend the infrastructure choices they are most familiar
The Right Tool for the Right Job  4


with. Terrible analogies are used. Buzzwords are watered down to
meaninglessness, and hype rides atop it all. About Hyperconverged.org 5

Here at Hyperconverged.org, we have our viewpoint as well: as one might

expect, we like HCI. But we’re also honest enough with ourselves to know
that HCI is a specifically shaped peg, and it won’t fit into every hole. And
while we use terrible analogies – and sometimes even buzzwords – it’s
worth the time to try to put these three infrastructure approaches in context,
because the debate surrounding them is part of why HCI emerged as an
approach to IT in the first place.

1
 TRADITIONAL CONVERGED HYPERCONVERGED

• Usually pre-built appliances,

• Complete freedom of choice
of vendors and components
Purchasing • Best for customization
• Overwhelming number of
choices can be confusing
• Systems are integrated from
various suppliers
• Limited selection of vendors
• Typically use SAN or
NAS storage
although software-only
choices do exist
• Least amount of freedom
of choice for vendors/
components
• Simplified purchasing process

• Multiple interfaces to manage • Typically, just a single interface

• Fewer interfaces to manage to manage everything
• Often needs specialized
Management
personnel • Management not as simple as • Often, can be managed with
hyperconverged generalists rather than more-
• More time-consuming expensive specialists

• One “throat to choke,”

• Multiple vendors involved; can • Usually just one vendor simplifying support

Support/
be a hassle to deal with
• Upgrades not always flexible;
Upgrades • Can suffer from vendor • Flexibility in upgrading, but can be difficult to just add
“blame game” dependent on vendor compute, for instance
• Very scalable • Good scalability • Solid scalability, but not as
much as other options

Traditional IT
Before we can dive in to the differences between traditional
IT, CI, and HCI, it would help to define what these three terms
mean. Traditional IT is where each element of a data center’s
infrastructure is selected (mostly) independently of the rest.
The word “mostly” is in parentheses because traditional IT
has never been quite so simply transactional. If one purchases
servers from a given vendor, there’s a decent chance that
networking, storage, software, or some other component might
also come from that vendor. Most organizations also make use
of channel partners rather than buying directly from vendors,
so the availability of a given solution from a channel partner is
also a factor.
In addition, requirements dictate selection. If, for example,
one required high availability to the extent that all network
connections had failovers, including multipath for storage, then
NFS-based NAS storage probably isn’t on the table. It’s been
three years since VMware embraced NFS 4.1, but support for
multipathing by NFS array vendors remains poor.
THE ADVANTAGE TO TRADITIONAL IT
IS THAT THE FREEDOM TO PICK ANY
SOLUTION FROM ANY VENDOR MEANS
THAT AN IT INFRASTRUCTURE CAN BE
DESIGNED TO MEET ANY NEED, AND
TO FIT ANY NICHE.
Similarly, organizations relying on channel partners will find
the solutions under consideration narrowed to those solutions
within the channel partner’s comfort zone. Channel partners
are engaged so that they may lend their expertise to product
selection, implementation and/or ongoing support and
maintenance. For decades this approach was not looked at
as either particularly confining or particularly liberating; it was
simply how IT was done.
The advantage to traditional IT is that the freedom to pick any
solution from any vendor means that an IT infrastructure can be
designed to meet any need, and to fit any niche. With traditional

H YP ERCONVERGED VS. C ON V E R G E D VS. T R ADI T I O N A L I T I N F R AST R U C T U R E 2

IT, the gating factor to finding the best solution for the job is the
time available to research the myriad options available.
The flip side of traditional IT is that multiple vendors are
involved, and organizations typically perform the final integration
themselves. Having multiple vendors involved has led to
“circular finger pointing” when an issue occurs, where vendors
blame one another instead of taking ownership of the problem.
Upgrades are similarly fraught: the burden of planning for and
then executing upgrades rests on the customer. Vendors may
provide some limited support, but that support rarely extends
to interactions of their product with the products provided by
other vendors, unless vendor partnerships and mutual support
agreements exist.
The existence of – and adherence to – product compatibility
lists can help alleviate some of the support burdens associated
with the multi-vendor nature of traditional IT. The cost of this,
however, is again a limiting of the scope of solutions that can be
considered for use.
Converged Infrastructure
This basic theme reiterated throughout the traditional IT section
will be revisited in both the CI and HCI sections: the more one
restricts the number of solutions to choose from, the easier that
IT is to both support and maintain.
Long before CI was a talking point (or even an acronym),
organizations turned to channel partners known as Systems
Integrators (SIs). The job of the SI was to take multiple products
– hardware and software – and make them work together. In
some circumstances, SIs would even write custom software to
marry all the various bits of IT together.
The important part was that SIs typically presented their offering
to the customer as a single solution. The organization purchased
“a payroll system,” not a VMware cluster, some storage,
networking, operating systems and application software.
CI is basically systems integration: someone builds the solution
for you, and sells it to you as a single SKU. Where CI differs
from traditional systems integration is that CI aims to present a
generic Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to the customer, not a
specific application or service.
Under the hood, CI often looks very much like traditional IT, often
using the same products, from the same vendors, that would be
used in a typical traditional IT infrastructure. CI is typically built
H YP ERCONVERGED VS. C ON V E R G E D VS. T R ADI T I O N A L I T I N F R AST R U C T U R E
using SAN or NAS storage arrays, though the use of HCI, scale out
storage, or open data fabrics are possible as well.
The goal of CI is to allow customers to spin up VMs, containers, and
even bare metal servers without having to worry about selecting,
integrating or upgrading significant portions of the infrastructure.
This is usually accomplished with a custom management interface,
as well as with a combination of professional services that handle
setup and upgrades.
THE MORE ONE RESTRICTS THE
NUMBER OF SOLUTIONS TO CHOOSE
FROM, THE EASIER THAT IT IS TO BOTH
SUPPORT AND MAINTAIN.
The custom management interface included with most CI
offerings reduces (but often does not fully eliminate) the need
for administrators to use the management interfaces of the
individual IT products that make up the CI solution. The custom
management interface used by CI infrastructures can be thought
of similarly to cloud computing, with one major difference: the
defining characteristic of a cloud is the self-service capability
of that cloud. CI vendors don’t necessarily go that far, often
being content with making resource provisioning “simple” for
administrators, with “simple” being open to interpretation.
Compared to traditional IT, CI is quite limited in vendor selection.
CI vendors have a very narrow list of partnerships. As a result,
while CI can fit many niches and meet most needs, there are
areas where CI is just not going to be the right pick, and either
HCI or traditional IT will be called for.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)
At its most basic, HCI is simply taking storage that is installed
inside individual servers, combining it into a single, shared pool
of storage, and then running workloads on those same servers.
Essentially, it is high availability shared storage without the need
for a SAN or NAS.
Hypothetically, HCI can work on any server, with any storage,
in any configuration. In practice, however, HCI is the most
restrictive of the lot. While some vendors offer HCI that can be
installed wherever the customer wishes, the majority of the most
popular HCI vendors either only sell pre-canned HCI appliances,
or have a proscriptive product compatibility list.
3
The result is that HCI solutions can be effectively thought of as
being a fully integrated, CI-like, IaaS-in-a-can solution, provided
by a single vendor. This provides a “single throat to choke”
support experience that is quite different from the circle of
blame that traditional IT frequently gets caught in.
HCI VENDORS CAN TEST THE STACK
OF HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE THEY
OFFER MORE THOROUGHLY THAN
THEIR COMPETITORS.
With HCI, upgrades are also easier, in large part because the
HCI vendor has a much narrower set of potential hardware and
software combinations to worry about than either traditional IT
or CI. HCI vendors can test the stack of hardware and software
they offer more thoroughly than their competitors, and many
HCI vendors are quite proud of how refined they’ve made the
support process for customers.
The Overlap
Unfortunately, few things are easy to definitively classify in IT.
A single vendor insisting on a narrow and proscriptive product
compatibility list can dramatically restrict choices, even in
traditional IT. Some flavors of HCI allow administrators to install
the HCI software on almost anything, meaning that HCI can in
some circumstances be more permissive than traditional IT.
CI, and especially HCI, have become popular in large part because
they make working with IT infrastructure easier. While much of the
key differentiation rests in how the various approaches to IT are
sourced, purchased and supported, most CI and HCI offerings
have a management experience that differs from traditional IT.
With traditional IT, administrators would have to administer each
component in the data center. Every storage array, NAS, switch,
server, and so forth would all have their own management
interface. In many cases, mastering these interfaces became
specialties, and even occupied entire careers.
CI solutions tend to offer a management interface that, at the
very least, makes dealing with all hardware below the hypervisor
less complicated. HCI solutions, on the other hand, can integrate
hardware management, storage, networking, hypervisor control,
data protection and even basic IT automation and orchestration
into a single interface.
H YP ERCONVERGED VS. C ON V E R G E D VS. T R ADI T I O N A L I T I N F R AST R U C T U R E
Today’s IT teams are required to manage an increasing number
of workloads with the same resources. In many organizations
a significant part of IT spend is being devoted to reducing
management overhead, especially among those companies
using traditional IT infrastructure. The Infrastructure as Code
(IaC) movement – i.e., writing code to manage configurations
and automate provisioning of infrastructure in addition to
deployments – can remove a great deal of the hassle involved in
the set-up, upgrading and ongoing administration of traditional
IT, but many of those same benefits can also be brought to
CI and HCI.
HCI IS PROBABLY THE LEAST
EXPENSIVE, EASIEST TO MANAGE,
AND LEAST DIFFICULT TO MAINTAIN
APPROACH TO MOST IT NEEDS.
IaC levels the ease of use playing field somewhat; however, IaC
is a speciality in and of itself. This means that large organizations
with well-staffed IT teams who embrace IaC may not see
much direct management benefit from CI or HCI. They would
mostly be searching for value in ease of upgrades, the ability
to scale non-disruptively, or unified vendor support. For some
organizations these are important considerations, while for
others these are irrelevances.
The Right Tool for the Right Job
As much as we would like to be able to say definitively that HCI
is the appropriate solution for all cases, this simply isn’t true. HCI
is probably the least expensive, easiest to manage, and least
difficult to maintain approach to most IT needs, but there are
always going to be niches where either traditional IT or CI are
the better fit.
Very large organizations that want to push the limits of what’s
possible with IT will probably benefit from sticking to traditional
IT, at least in part. Traditional IT, especially when combined with
modern private cloud or container software, can operate at
scales HCI providers can only dream of.
Similarly, specialty hardware may be needed to meet extreme
uptime or availability requirements, to operate in extreme
environments, or where extremely low latencies are required.
Here, large organizations will most likely benefit from
4
individually sourcing solutions, and keeping specialists for those
solutions in-house.
Smaller enterprises, but which are themselves still quite large,
are likely to benefit from CI. CI vendors will often be able to
incorporate technologies that serve workloads at extremes
beyond what HCI vendors can support, even if they’re not
usually bleeding-edge.
ABOUT ACTUALTECH MEDIA
ActualTech Media provides enterprise IT decision makers with
the information they need to make informed, strategic decisions
as they modernize and optimize their IT operations.
Leading 3rd party IT industry influencers Scott D. Lowe, David
M. Davis and special technical partners cover hot topics from
the software-defined data center to hyperconvergence and
virtualization.

Cutting through the hype, noise and claims around new data
MOST ORGANIZATIONS WILL SEE A
center technologies isn’t easy, but ActualTech Media helps
BENEFIT FROM USING HCI, EVEN IF
find the signal in the noise. Analysis, authorship and events
THEY DO NOT USE HCI FOR ALL OF produced by ActualTech Media provide an essential piece of the
THEIR IT NEEDS. technology evaluation puzzle.

More information available at actualtechmedia.com.

In contrast, HCI can and does find a home with some of the
smallest customers. Typically aimed at midmarket customers
and smaller enterprises, HCI solutions are designed not to
require specialists to operate, so they are a natural fit for smaller
organizations.

In any case, most organizations will see a benefit from using

HCI, even if they do not use HCI for all of their IT needs. HCI can
meet most needs, and where it can be used, it should make the
lives of administrators easier.

ABOUT HYPERCONVERGED.ORG
Hyperconverged.org is a project founded by the technical experts
at ActualTech Media. The site has been designed to provide
actionable information to IT pros and decision makers around the
technical pros and cons of hyperconverged infrastructure, decision
making and evaluation criteria, and research and analysis on the
marketplace of hyperconverged offerings. The site does have a
single annual vendor sponsor – for most of 2018 this sponsor is
Scale Computing – allowing the sponsor to offer some of their
content for download to interested readers.

H YP ERCONVERGED VS. C ON V E R G E D VS. T R ADI T I O N A L I T I N F R AST R U C T U R E 5