Dell numbers the days for hyperconverged infrastructure

Back in the day, Netscape's former CEO Jim Barksdale said there are two ways to make money in business. Bundling and unbundling. That idiomatic wisdom is back, with Dell Technologies now advocating disaggregaged infrastructure over converged infrastructure. Why? Cost, flexibility, and performance. These three are crucial factors as excessive demand for components and associated price escalations are among the few apparent barriers to wider-spread AI adoption.

Dell Technologies Vice President of Product Management for Private Cloud and AI Solutions Caitlin Gordon said there's significant shift reshaping data centre strategies, with hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) giving way to disaggregated infrastructure. She said customers are moving toward compute-storage disaggregation to achieve lower costs, greater efficiency, and future-proof flexibility amid evolving demands, including hypervisor uncertainty and rising hardware expenses.

"There was a level of operational simplicity you could not get with disaggregated infrastructure, and it worked for a long time," Gordon explained. "It worked for a long time because most data centres were running on VMware. The infrastructure costs were relatively predictable, so that although everyone always knew with HCI you were probably overprovisioning, it was okay because of the operational benefits."

More recently, she said, the conversation has flipped. "Nearly every customer is considering their options for the hypervisor. It's disrupted the industry, and it's been very, very hard for our customers, because when you have a foundation for your core business applications, now you have to figure out how to change that out. It isn't something you have a plan for. It's unpleasant, unwanted, and it looks like it's unnecessary, but it's a cost issue that makes it necessary."

Once bitten twice shy, so the saying goes, and the grim spectre of lock-in once again rears its toothy head. "The number one thing I hear from these customers is 'investment protection', avoiding lockdown, because there isn't a 'one for one' replacement, They know they're going to have to do this over time, and they know they're probably going to have to make some compromises, and most importantly, they know that whatever they're investing in the infrastructure, they need more modularity and adaptability into their future because they don't know when the next unknown is going to happen".

Gordon is upfront about the conundrum: "Although we led HCI and continue to do so, we fundamentally find for most customers it's not the right infrastructure anymore. One, it's by definition locked into a single hypervisor, so that doesn't work very well. Two, it's actually very inefficient, and now very expensive infrastructure, because you can't scale compute and storage separately, but you're having to buy compute nodes to support your workload and your storage."

All in one, therefore, means "Buying extremely expensive compute and extremely expensive storage, with the industry parts shortage going into those numbers, so your acquisition cost is extremely high relative to what you need out of it. You're having to overprovision, so customers are starting to understand getting the most efficient storage footprint, and with [Dell's Powerstore products] you get up to five to one data reduction ratio guaranteed."

Alongside, compute gains in efficiency, said Gordon, because it's not serving the storage workload. "That means minimal memory, minimal drives, and therefore minimal impact with all of the supply chain and pricing constraints."

Could there be a fly in the ointment? Why yes. "What we had never offered before is the operational simplicity of HCI with a disaggregated infrastructure. That's why we introduced Dell Private Cloud Hub Sharing, and we at first we've supported VMware and Red Hot. The Dell Private Cloud essentially says invest in a disaggregated infrastructure, but then the software makes that disaggregated infrastructure have an HCI experience.

All of that begs the question: que pasa HCI? It's not a case of babies going out with the bathwater, as Gordon made clear. "We've all been in technology for a long time, so we know these transitions take time," she said. "We continue to have an HCI portfolio and it does have a role; but we do think it's going to shrink over time,, and largely that role is for customers who are invested in HCI."

Infrastructure, of course, hangs around for years. "Yeah. Generally, these projects are measured in years and we're here to help our customers during that transition."