HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI) is a hot topic these days. It’s promise is increased flexibility (agility) and scalability at a lower cost than infrastructures based on traditional shared storage (SAN/NAS) while retaining the functionality that we have become accustomed to (like snapshots, cloning and replication) and supporting most enterprise application environments.
Creating a hyperconverged infrastructure can be achieved very easily with the building block concept of companies like Nutanix and Simplivity. You can start very simple by creating a cluster of (usually) only 3 nodes and gradually increase the size of your infrastructure when required by simply adding nodes to the existing environment. The potential disadvantage of this (hardware) appliance-based approach is that you are usually limited in your choice of appliance configuration (amount of CPU, memory and type/capacity of storage devices). This means that you could end up with an infrastructure with too much CPU, too much memory or too much storage capacity (so too much investment …).