Converged infrastructure seemed brilliant five years ago. One vendor, one stack, and one throat to choke. But then Broadcom bought VMware, and according to Omdia research company ESG, bumped hypervisor costs for 72% of enterprises in 18 months. CIOs who built their entire infrastructure around VMware are now staring at renewal quotes that blow their budgets — and ripping out hyperconverged systems means starting from scratch.
A disaggregated approach to storage changes the math by separating it from compute. When the two live separately, you can swap hypervisors without touching your data.
Container adoption needs flexible infrastructure
Containers are an alternative (or an addition) to VMs, built for the 39% of enterprises that want to modernize their applications in response to increased VMware costs. But the Kubernetes container orchestration system doesn't replace VMs overnight. Most shops run both, sometimes for years. Container environments also swing wildly in their infrastructure demands, while traditional VMs plod along more predictably. HCI took off around 2010-2011, before infrastructure-as-a-code tools like Ansible and Terraform existed. The architecture wasn't built with today’s highly dynamic, cloud-native workloads in mind.
The biggest mistake you can make is to create separate silos for VMs and containers. If your HCI environment works fine today, keep it. But new projects will likely need disaggregated storage that serves both VMs and containers from the same array. That means looking for storage with several key features:
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Download Now- File system support: Look for storage that scales linearly from terabytes to petabytes without architectural changes. Enterprises shouldn't have to tolerate storage that forces platform decisions based on capacity limits. Flexible modern disaggregated storage should handle block, file, and container workloads on one platform, giving them all the options they need in a fast-moving IT environment.
- Integration: A good disaggregated storage system will talk natively with VMware, Kubernetes, Ansible, and Terraform. A file system that can straddle AWS and Azure infrastructure lets enterprises hedge their bets or support multi-cloud and hybrid systems.
- Automation: Ansible and Terraform are mature now, but back when HCI launched they barely existed. Today, enterprises use products like these to manage their infrastructure programmatically. They can do it with storage too, so long as their storage exposes the right APIs. Many legacy arrays were never designed with modern automation or IaC workflows in mind.
- Easy upgrades: Disaggregated storage enables IT teams to test new platforms in production without betting the farm, because the storage layer stays constant. To that end, seek out non-disruptive hardware and software upgrades that let you swap out compute nodes while data stays put.
Managing migration
Enterprises with large, sprawling storage estates can't rip or replace this stuff. Net new innovation (especially anything container-based) requires flexibility not just because the workloads are volatile, but because the requirements are still evolving. A strategic approach means prioritizing flexibility and agility before making new deployment decisions.
Enterprises will inch forward, gingerly testing their modern application platforms along the way. So migration options must be incremental instead of all-or-nothing. Look for native tools that support migration and multicloud backup, meaning you're not locked into a single deployment model.
The real win comes in reducing the penalty for being wrong about which platform wins in five years. Focusing on technology that aligns with business goals, is simple to deploy, easy to manage, and scalable for future needs will never be a career-limiting move. Feature bloat lost its appeal when teams realized complexity kills agility.
Yesterday's mantra is "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". Tomorrow's is "no one ever got fired for buying something that kept their options open".
