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When converged and hyper-converged -- and cloud -- converge
This article is part of the Storage issue of August 2019, Vol. 17, No. 11
The difference between converged and hyper-converged is becoming less clear cut. My advice is to beware of hyper-converged infrastructure products with "HCI" in their names. They may not be hyper-converged. NetApp HCI is a converged infrastructure that combines separate servers and SolidFire flash storage. Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Nimble Storage dHCI is a similar setup, except it uses HPE Nimble arrays and ProLiant DL servers. Microsoft Azure Stack HCI is Windows Server Software-Defined (WSSD) rebranded. Although those products can meet the needs of a typical hyper-converged infrastructure customer, they don't meet the definition of HCI -- at least not the two hardware appliances in the group. For NetApp and HPE, the "tell" is in the product name, because the vendor knows it doesn't fit the textbook definition of hyper-converged. NetApp calls NetApp HCI a "hybrid cloud infrastructure," while the dHCI in Nimble Storage dHCI stands for "disaggregated hyper-converged infrastructure," even if HCI is, at its core, an aggregated ...
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Machine learning for data analytics can solve big data storage issues
Discover how AI and machine learning -- with support from major vendors and technologies like Lambda architecture, FPGAs and containers -- address big data analytics challenges.
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The realities of unstructured data management revealed
Managing and gleaning business value from unstructured data is of utmost importance to enterprises today. Our infographic outlines the challenges respondents face.
News in this issue
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When converged and hyper-converged -- and cloud -- converge
Price, ease of management and use cases should determine if you use hyper-converged, converged infrastructure or on-premises public cloud stacks. There are differences, however.
Columns in this issue
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Larger, expandable HCI nodes bring big infrastructure benefits
Discover why a larger node strategy enables enterprises to better consolidate workloads in a hyper-converged infrastructure environment while reducing complexity and cost.
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Support for production-level hybrid cloud use cases on the rise
A recent Taneja Group survey reveals that hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are the preferred cloud storage architectures for a variety of enterprise storage use cases.