Are You Falling for These Hyperconverged Infrastructure Myths?

There’s no question there’s a lot of hype about hyperconverged infrastructure these days. The market is expected to grow to more than $12 billion by 2022, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 43.59 percent. While the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure are real, along with all that hype comes some confusion and misinformation. Gartner has identified seven myths of hyperconverged infrastructure; companies that plan to adopt this architecture should make sure they understand the realities instead.

Myth 1: Hyperconverged infrastructure uses standard, open architectures.

While hyperconverged systems allow you to easily grow your infrastructure by adding standardized, commodity nodes, this standardization doesn’t cross vendor platforms. In addition, the flexibility of hyperconverged infrastructure derives from its software, which is largely platform specific. As a result, these systems are not readily interchangeable.

Myth 2: Hyperconverged infrastructure will fail to meet mission-critical scalability and resiliency requirements.

The performance of hyperconverged systems should be reviewed in context of their usage. Hyperconverged systems match well to the needs of high-availability, virtualized workloads. Additionally, the scalability of hyperconverged systems is highly dependent on vendor architecture.

Myth 3: Hyperconverged infrastructure is the lowest-cost architecture.

Because hyperconverged infrastructure is easily extended as needed, the initial investment can be lower than traditional server and storage configurations. However, continual expansion due to increased capacity requirements can in some cases add up to more than an initial purchase of higher capacity conventional systems.

Myth 4: Hyperconverged infrastructure is primarily for virtual desktops.

While virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) was the original, favorite use case for hyperconverged systems, there are now many other use cases supporting hyperconvergence. Other use cases include supporting remote and branch offices and development/testing applications. There are now even hyperconverged systems designed specifically to support secondary workloads and consolidate backup storage.

Myth 5: Hyperconverged infrastructure will eliminate traditional storage.

While hyperconverged systems add true value in the data center for many applications, there are still situations where companies will want to rely on traditional disk storage arrays. Particularly for mission-critical applications, the proven reliability of traditional storage may be more significant than any cost savings due to the hyperconverged infrastructure.

Myth 6: Hyperconverged infrastructure eliminates silos.

Hyperconverged systems do eliminate the separation between server and storage support related to those devices. However, because hyperconverged infrastructure doesn’t integrate well with existing infrastructure, the hyperconverged systems can themselves become a silo within the data center.

Myth 7: Hyperconverged infrastructure won’t change vendor preferences.

In fact, adopting hyperconverged infrastructure will lead companies to shed their loyalty to their current vendors unless those vendors provide newer, flexible solutions that provide customers with additional benefits.

Explore the Reality of Hyperconverged Systems

dcVAST has the real-world experience with hyperconverged systems to help you separate the myths from the facts. Our analysis can help you select the most appropriate infrastructure solution for your environment, and our managed services help ensure you achieve the full benefit of that solution. Contact us to learn more about how hyperconverged infrastructure can help you solve your data center challenges.