What’s Stopping You? Three Misplaced HCI Concerns

Published On: 8th November 2017//3.1 min read//Tags: , //

Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions (HCI) are enjoying a lot of attention from IT leaders and decision-makers at distributed organizations, where scalability and ease of deployment are key requirements.

Findings suggest that there’s a very low penetration of companies using hyperconverged infrastructure solutions currently. According to 2021 research by TechTarget’s ESG,  just 8% of organizations use HCI for more than half of their business apps and workloads, and this number is only expected to jump up to 28% over the next two years.

A reason behind this low number of HCI deployments due to the pandemic – particularly for those solutions that required IT personnel to be on-premise to install and set up IT infrastructure. But that makes up part of the story.

So with such a small number of organizations planning to deploy HCI, who exactly is concerned, and what exactly are they concerned about?

1) Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions are too expensive

Initially, hyperconverged infrastructure solutions were perhaps inadvertently targeted toward organizations with big budgets. Many of the vendors in the market were used to selling large datacenter and enterprise products, their HCI solutions fitting neatly alongside those products.

These solutions were out of reach for SMEs, as well as distributed enterprises with many locations, each needing local compute and storage. These use cases fit within the umbrella of edge computing and many vendors have come into the market from a different angle identifying that SMEs and distributed enterprises have unique IT challenges and are inhibited by cost. Both HPE and Lenovo now offer edge-focused hardware that aims to simplify IT in these environments and enable the creation of low-cost HCI solutions.

2) HCI solutions mean vendor lock-in

Until recently, embracing an HCI solution from most vendors meant accepting some element of lock-in whether that be hardware and virtualization adoption or hypervisor adoption. And while this model may benefit some organizations and brings with it an element of simplicity at the procurement phase, the industry has seen a trend towards flexibility and greater inter-compatibility between solutions.

This has resulted in organizations being able to realistically consider deployment models such as build-your-own hyperconverged infrastructure. This is facilitated by vendors working in partnership to build joint solutions and ensure software and hardware are compatible and can co-exist. In turn, this gives organizations the flexibility to switch vendors at a particular level in their HCI stack (such as the hypervisor layer) without having to perform a complete storage refresh.

3) Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions mean single vendor dependency

It’s true that many solutions consolidating storage, compute, networking and virtualization come under a single umbrella. This can strain existing vendor relationships and could cause difficulties should a single vendor relationship turn sour at a later date, due to falling performance, cost increases for future deployments or any other issue. Yet there are vendors that have a more co-operative approach to building hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, able to adapt to an organization’s needs and existing vendor relationships.

How StorMagic tackles HCI concerns

StorMagic was founded with a vision of managing storage infrastructure through software, in a simple, cost-effective and flexible manner. As such, we have developed strong relationships with hardware vendors, such as HPE and Lenovo, enabling us to work with customers’ existing preferred vendors and to develop HCI solutions for different infrastructure requirements.

If you’d like to learn more about SvSAN – StorMagic’s virtual SAN solution which enables highly available hyperconverged infrastructure on any two x86 servers – you can access the product data sheet by clicking here. Ready to dive right in? You can download a free 15-day trial of SvSAN and get started today!

You can read more about the deployment options possible for hyperconverged infrastructure and determine which is best for your organization by downloading our dedicated white paper.

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