Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI, also called a hyper-converged integrated system. HCIS) refers to integrating virtualization of storage and computing in a data center.
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Features
At a high level, hyper-convergence can support common data center availability and reliability requirements, infrastructure is managed and workloads are deployed through a single interface to the underlying operating hardware. The difference between converged and hyper-converged infrastructures is that the building blocks of each of the subsystems in converged infrastructures are discrete; the server is separate and used as a server, just as the storage subsystem is separate and used as functional storage.
Hyperconvergence moves away from multiple discrete systems that are packaged together and evolve into software-defined intelligent environments that all run in commodity, off-the-shelf x86 rack servers. Its infrastructures are made up of conforming x86 server systems equipped with direct-attached storage. It includes the ability to plug and play into a data center pool of like systems. All physical data center resources reside on a single administrative platform for both hardware and software layers. Unifying all platform types to one, together with single vendor management, eliminates traditional data center inefficiencies and reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for data centers.
HCI is the most popular method for acquiring the best-understood version of software defined storage (SDS). It is a fully packaged system expression of SDS. The terms should not be seen as synonymous, but they are closely related. The most well known SDS packages offer the software building blocks for integrating and deploying an HCI system. Some HCI systems also offer their software a la carte as SDS, but typically only for a limited range of chosen server vendors and configurations.
Potential impact
The potential of the hyper-converged infrastructure is that companies will no longer need to rely on different compute and storage systems, though it is still too early to prove that it can replace storage arrays in all market segments. It is likely to further simplify management and increase resource-utilization rates where it does apply.
While hyperscale web services also use original design manufacturer x86 systems with software in custom ways, a model that is clearly scalable, they do so with a variety of optimized server types (some of which have no durable capacity) and storage approaches, not with one. See e.g. the variety of approaches in the Open Compute Project. Hyperconvergence is consistent in some key ways with this model, but it is simplified for smaller deployments by most vendors through focusing on one type of system and storage infrastructure, and this is believed to limit its success to date in mixed use, low latency and Tier 1 deployments at scale.