What is convergence in technology? For the uninitiated, it is the eventual merging of computing, storage, and networking technologies – whether previously unrelated or not – that operate as an integrated and unified system, performing one or more business functions. As a result of sustained technological convergence over the past three decades, today, IT is inseparable from the internet, telecom, media and consumer electronics.
When it comes to IT in the enterprise, convergence is personified by today’s multicloud systems that enable IT management from a single interface with lower operational costs, improved performance for every application, better data governance, and no vendor lock-in. A Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is the most recent development in Data Center Management (DCM) that enables data centers to go from "cost centers" to sources of innovation, revenue, and business value.
HCI has quickly become pivotal to the future of IT. With its inherent scalability and flexibility, HCI is poised to empower companies handling complicated, modern workloads.
Artificial intelligence has recently burst onto the scene and has fundamentally transformed the IT landscape over night. As enterprises seek to unlock this new frontier in computing potential, 78% of organizations are now using the technology according to research from Stanford University.
Traditional IT architectures are struggling to keep up in this complex new world of AI, but by integrating everything into a single software-defined platform, HCI is offering a powerful solution. For AI projects, HCI means greater efficiency, superior scalability and easier management – essential when handling insanely large datasets like AI models do or training machine learning algorithms that require continuous fine-tuning.
“Today’s HCI is about a unified management experience for all your resources,” said Steve McDowell, senior tech analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
By eliminating siloing, HCI is more agile and able to more easily accommodate innovation. For example, HCI can power AI edge computing applications that can help factories do predictive maintenance and stay online for longer and ensure patients get their scans read more quickly at the hospital.
With surging demand for AI-ready data centers, HCI enables IT professionals to rent from service providers, allowing them to meet constantly changing demands as computing, networking and storage system needs regularly spike or drop.
Nutanix has evolved its software to manage HCI systems together with multiple public cloud services. And it continues to evolve to meet technological advancements and shifts in the industry. After Broadcom acquired VMware, many IT teams faced price hikes and other changes that drove them to explore options for augmenting or moving away from VMware’s virtualization software. When investments in hardware are still not fully realized, many IT teams are beholden to keep using the hardware they bought.
“This drove us to create an alternative deployment option that allows IT teams to swap vSAN software for Nutanix software to reuse existing server hardware as part of a connected hybrid multicloud platform,” said Steve Carter, product marketing director at Nutanix.
More recently, Nutanix software integrated with Pure Storage FlashArray so IT teams can leverage high-performing, secure external storage for demanding data workloads, including AI.
As businesses seek to build out their AI capabilities, most will look to keep their proprietary and sensitive data in house. In fact, 90% of organizations say data privacy is a priority for their organization when implementing generative AI solutions, according to Nutanix’s 2025 Enterprise Cloud Index. With a private, HCI-powered data center, their information can be properly safeguarded while giving them an easy way to access a wide variety of cloud providers and the latest technological developments that come with that capability.
In that way, HCI has also helped create a true hybrid cloud environment. HCI’s unified management makes it perfect for hybrid cloud, as IT professionals can effortlessly operate between on-premises and public cloud. This simplifies infrastructure while enabling painless workload portability. Coupled together, applications can run efficiently while maintaining critical data security and compliance that businesses find so important in the age of AI.
“As the basis of a hybrid cloud environment, HCI can create a consistent experience across all platforms, whether on-premises or in the cloud,” said Lucas Mearian, an International Data Corp. research manager who specializes in infrastructure.
So what puts the “hyper” in HCI? What makes it worth the effort to migrate from a converged configuration that already consolidates hardware and software, improves integration between different systems, and simplifies IT management?
HCI eliminates the few remaining downsides of convergence, transforming infrastructure into a truly software-defined data center (SDDC), optimizing utilization rates, enhancing IT agility, and enabling management from a single console. Here are some of the major benefits for enterprises ready to shift their focus – and dollars – from converged infrastructure to HCI with more resources dedicated to business goals.
Accelerated performance with integrated virtualization
HCI configurations have multiple nodes connected to Direct Access Storage. BMC informs us that the “converged architecture storage is attached directly to the physical server,” whereas HCI “has a storage controller function that runs as a service on every node in the cluster.”
This shows its advantage in two key ways:
Improved throughput and I/O speeds: Less cabling and shorter travel time mean the read/write functions don’t slow down processing too much.
Data availability assurance: With storage structures in HCI, data is made available to the processing partners that need it most, based on actual data usage habits, not assumptions. This includes Data Path Redundancy, which creates alternate paths for access in case a specific VM becomes unavailable.
Higher efficiency in DCM from the shop floor to the top floor
Increased system resource utilization and true hardware independence are the immediately visible benefits of HCI. Since hyperconvergence is 100% software-defined, there is no lock-in to proprietary hardware. This will become increasingly significant as businesses continue to evolve and utilize more HCI features, while also making better and more extensive use of cloud technology.
Here’s how your data center becomes more efficient with hyperconvergence:
Time to market decreases, and agility increases as lead time is minimized. This is made possible by VM replication through known good images and templates with or without changes to configuration settings.
Self-service provisioning allows staff working on development, data science, application testing, and other workloads to request and receive environments as needed.
Reduce complexity with a “Single Pane of Glass” to manage resources
A single view of multiple configurations, both for administration and analysis, is what HCI offers. This can include on-premise, hybrid, and private clouds, native cloud apps, remote and branch locations, as well as multi-cloud environments.
The abstraction layer that sits above the multiple public and private cloud interfaces, as well as automation services, means that management can account for differences in disparate systems and centrally govern them from a unified console.
Staff can focus more on business goals and less on firefighting
Companies that have adopted HCI are seeing a drop in the overtime that management and support staff put in each week. This aspect of work-life balance enables specialists to move out of constant firefighting mode and opens the opportunity to focus on more proactive business initiatives. How much value that may provide to the enterprise overall isn’t easy to calculate but falls into the “known benefits” category of business values.
For digital transformation efforts, companies need business analysts and IT generalists more than infrastructure specialists. Those enterprises engaged in HCI implementation are more likely to see a redistribution in hiring, with an increase in both the generalist and data analyst categories. Conversely, specialist jobs in security, database and storage administration, and application development might see decreases in hiring.
Support more differentiated workloads
Being completely software-defined, HCI doesn't have the limitations that keep a CI directed to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) applications. CI configurations were typically assembled for a specific purpose, each with its own unique support requirements.
While CI is still being used for more applications at present, HCI can be optimized to run virtually any type of business application out there (and still hit operational target metrics):
- Business-critical applications
- Messaging and collaboration applications
- Server virtualization and private cloud
- Big Data and cloud-native applications
- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
- Remote Office and Branch Office (ROBO)
- Development and testing applications
Upgrades and maintenance with zero downtime
In a true HCI, there is no “spare” hardware for separate environments. Adding and removing nodes is done on demand and in minutes. Migrating specific processing functions to a different node for maintenance is part of the built-in functionality that most HCI solution providers offer – processing is simply moved to the optimal resource without disruption. Once the components being updated are addressed, the maintenance window is closed, and processing returns to its “normal” state.
Workload balancing based on data utilization
An HCI facilitates virtual computing platforms that scale out linearly, have the ability to self-heal, are always available, and with the capability to handle prolonged workload bursts at optimized capacity. Nodes can be rapidly added to incorporate new applications and workloads. Scaling down is just as straightforward. Further, the workload can be shifted to compatible nodes on demand.
All of these capabilities enable the enterprise to maintain a “right-sized” data center at all times. HCI software can highlight processing surpluses and shortages based on actual usage and peak times. The addition of AI, which is part of most HCI configurations and products these days, can anticipate issues and recommend course corrections for resource usage, improving TCO in the process.
Adding the “Hyper” to Convergence
Migrating to an HCI in phases is a best practice supported by the ability to run infrastructure resiliency and reliability tests continuously. HCI is truly a different kind of data center: smaller, tighter, leaner, and more robust than the standard data center configurations, including CI.
Understanding the differences and knowing some of the benefits is just the first step. At this point, there is still a place for CI in specific instances. However, operational requirements and technological advances are making the shift to HCI inevitable. AI technology has been dramatically transforming industries and now it too is reshaping the IT world. Now, the question for enterprises is when, not if HCI will be deployed.
Dipti Parmar is a contributing writer. She has written for CIO.com, Entrepreneur, CMO.com, and Inc. magazine. Follow her on Twitter @dipTparmar.
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