Data center managers have a handful of new converged and hyper-converged infrastructure systems to choose from, and though there are components that set these systems apart, the common denominator is flash storage.
Converged infrastructure vendors are pushing the denser, faster storage alongside more flexible networking and commodity compute as a compelling combination for modern data centers.
“All-flash will be the primary storage in data centers in the next three to five years,” said Camberley Bates, analyst at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm in Boulder, Colo., which recently published a guide to hyper-converged infrastructure.
When all-flash comes up in the converged/hyper-converged infrastructure purchase, Bates said, it gives data centers a chance to adopt the process changes and explore the capabilities of all-flash before fully converting their storage infrastructure. Converged infrastructure takes away the integration and management hurdles of new deployments.