What you need to know before buying hyper-converged technology

Last updated:November 2018

Buyer's Guide

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Hyper-converged technology offers organizations a way to make their IT infrastructure more agile and efficient. By integrating compute, core storage and storage networking into a single, scalable platform, an HCI system can help reduce storage costs and simplify data center management.

A hyper-converged architecture is suitable for any workload that might have typically been hosted in a virtualized environment. This includes virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments as well as use cases involving applications that have been shifted to the cloud. Hyper-convergence can also support highly distributed environments, such as companies with hundreds or thousands of small branch locations. When companies need additional computing capacity or storage capacity, they simply add more nodes to their HCI cluster.

Before selecting an HCI vendor, it's crucial to carefully evaluate your HCI requirements so you can make a compelling business case to management. For example, do you need to provide the same operating environment for both on-premises and public cloud workloads? Which deployment option would be most beneficial -- an integrated HCI appliance, HCI software that is sold as part of a reference architecture, or HCI that operates both on-premises and in the public cloud? By examining the key features and functions of leading HCI products, and by matching those to your organization's requirements, you can choose the hyper-converged storage product that will best suit your needs.

To help you create a shortlist of hyper-converged products, we've provided a photo story that highlights 10 leading HCI vendors. This roundup illustrates how each vendor addresses deployment options, standard storage management features and advanced secondary storage features, such as data protection, backup, archiving and data recovery. 

This hyper-converged technology buyer's guide focuses on 10 market-leading vendors that offer software-defined storage and appliances. Our research is based on TechTarget surveys and reports from other well-respected research firms, including Gartner and Forrester.

1Key criteria to selecting the right hyper-converged product

Each organization has individual business needs and requirements, so each will have varying demands of its HCI product. Learn what leading hyper-converged vendors provide to help organizations align with those needs.

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