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Hyper-converged solutions (in essence a software-defined system with tightly integrated storage, networking and compute resources) are all the rage at the moment. However, while I was doing a talk on trends through the end of the decade, someone who represented an enterprise class company, explained why they didn't work for him. They'd done extensive trials from a broad number of vendors and the results made it clear that they needed to approach their problems with a more traditional solution. I'm a fan of the concept of hyper-converged, but we so often focus almost exclusively on the benefits of this approach we forget that it also has some shortcomings.
Let's refresh this week.
Benefits
The clear benefits of having a highly integrated and tested system are short deployment times and relatively high reliability. This is because each component is put through a massive series of tests to assure it works with every other component and, done right, you end up with an enterprise class appliance. Basically, it is almost a data center in a box (we'll get to the "almost" part in a minute).
Where a traditional solution based on buying components could take months...