For the past few years, the big boys (HP, Cisco, Dell) have been trying to convince us that converged infrastructure is the way to go. Buy the stack of compute, storage, and network from us and off you go. One throat to choke, the best experience because all the components are engineered to work optimally together.

But is converged infrastructure already on the way out and now hyper-converged infrastructure the way to go with virtualized workloads.

My first experience with hyper-converged was with Nutanix. To be honest I didn’t get and didn’t trust it. I needed to get my hands dirty in order to understand the new approach to virtualized workloads that Nutanix offers.

It finally clicked and then eventually I find there are others out there that compete in this space (Simplivity, Scale Computing, Pivot3). Great! I am all for competition and choice.

When it comes to hyper-converged solutions in general, some of my concerns are:

• Will the solution start cracking apart at a certain scale? The file system starts to crack at certain node count.
• And since I am a desktop virtualization guy, does the solution support GPU’s?
• Do you support only a single virtualization platform? Will there be additional options in the future?

From an administrator point of view, hyper-converged solutions are a great solution because of the brick by brick ability to scale out approach.

What’s been your experience with hyper-converged solutions? Are you using it for a certain use-case?

Tags: cisco, Dell, hyper, hyper converged, nutanex, pivot3, scale computing, simplivity, solution support