HyperConverged v.s. Hybrid Cloud

Has someone been telling you that HyperConverged Infrastructure, known as HCI, is the same thing as Hybrid Cloud infrastructure? Yeah? Well, no, it’s not. I just published a longer article on how they are related (and are also very different) in SearchCloudComputing here.

If that’s TL;DR then basically HCI is a great building block for a more modern modular IT architecture. Hybrid cloud is more about the virtual compute-based umbrella apps and data layer that can run across clouds and on-premise infrastructure. You can use HCI to host the private parts of hybrid cloud, and even run virtual shadows of HCI services in public clouds to make hybridizing with on-premise HCI easier. But once you have shifted your IT operations up to cloud land, you no longer really care about the actual infrastructure running underneath (unless you are the cloud service provider!).

With more vendors (e.g. HPE Greenlake) offering to forward place their infrastructure in your data center and remotely manage it as a private cloud for you to use as a utility, IT really no longer need care about the bits and bytes of infrastructure. The vendor may very well leverage their own HCI, but now that’s fully their own “internal” architectural decision. Could be HCI or could be a mainframe in there. Like the honey badger, “IT don’t care” as long as they can immediately provision VM’s out of it.

So what do you all think? Seems from here that the future is a hybrid architecture – not one thing or another. And likely to stretch across edge to remote to data center to public cloud(s).