VMware
HyperConverged Infrastructure Is Now Just A Feature
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I was always in the group that vSAN was for companies that did not want to purchase or could not afford a good SAN.
In my opinion HCI was never supposed to be “the one style of infrastructure to rule them all”. Nutanix was the only company that was claiming it was.
I’d definitely consider changing the word “feature” to what it really is, an “option”
I have some ‘kinda’ old servers and an old ass SAN that Needed to be replaced.
We looked at all sorts of solutions. And we were able to get a 4 node vSAN solution for the cost of what one storage array would be. New compute and new all flash storage.
We built in scale up growth into the chassis, and actually dropped to single socket EPYCs and kept our MS licensing the same and VMware licensing cut in half. All while improving performance and maintainability.
So far; It’s absolute the best route we could have gone.
I don’t really see a reason why anyone would opt for traditional SAN over HCI for a normal medium sized business.
We bought HCI for a Horizon View deployment and honestly I am still not sure why we didn’t just build it out on the same hardware & config we use elsewhere in our infrastructure. It cost just as much and we have ended up with a totally bespoke environment with vSAN (we don’t use vSAN anywhere else) and a different hardware vendor to who we normally use too. The ordering and installation process was a total crock, too.
I looked at HCI back when it just came out, but couldn’t justify the cost of it. So I went separate parts for SAN & CPU/MEM.
I just went through the same thing again looking at Cisco, and HCI pricing looked better, until you started looking at doing individual component upgrade, instead of a whole upgrade. If I needed more disk, I might have to add another node and the cost jumped up quite a bit. So, I ended up buying a UCS Mini, fiber channel and a 3par 8400 for the same price as the base configuration of the HCI.
But now I get to upgrade a component at a time without having to spend a large amount of money on another node.