Once a term gets pegged as trendy in enterprise IT, its actual meaning quickly goes out the window. It becomes less about what that word represents, and more about how you can skew your existing products to somehow claim to be part of this rising trend. This quickly leads to a morass of marketing bluster, and genuine confusion about how solutions and products fit into categories.
Keith Townsend tries to rescue two of the trendiest buzzwords in use today: hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud. He rightly compares the equating of all HCI solutions as hybrid cloud similar to the “cloud washing” days when anyone who delivered software over the internet was suddenly a cloud provider.
HCI simply isn’t hybrid cloud. It’s a way to simplify provisioning and deployment of virtualization infrastructure on-site. This can make it much more feasible for an organization to utilize a private cloud. This in turn could be used as part of a hybrid cloud strategy. HCI has the possibility to enable a hybrid cloud, but two equate the two just creates confusion.
Keith Townsend Comments:
When discussing hybrid cloud with your HCI vendors, ask the basic question of how the end user experience changed with the implementation of their product. If the answers focus on time to value versus direct consumption, then the solution isn’t what I’d call true hybrid cloud.
[…] with the company’s SolidFire and ONTAP offerings. While we’ve recently covered that HCI and hybrid cloud aren’t the same thing, NetApp has recently expanded their tools to make it easier to move workloads and data across […]