In a discussion led by Wikibon’s Stu Miniman, cohost of theCUBE, from the SilconANGLE Media team, three industry panelists examined VMware, Inc.’s emergent focus on hyper-convergence functionality and what it means for customers.

Panel members included Chris Miller, principal architect at AdvizeX Technologies, LLC; Gaetan Castelein, senior director of product management and product management, Cloud Infrastructure at VMware; and Raj Yavatkar, fellow and chief architect of converged infrastructure at VMware. Panel topics considered included the recent unveiling of VMware’s EVO SDDC software suite and the roll-out of its 6.1 platform, among other discussion points.

Trimming the fat

As Castelein put it, hyper-converged tech infrastructure offers a “fundamentally better building-block,” allowing for data-management that is “simple, scalable, high-performance and cost-effective.”

Miller agreed with this evaluation and noted that hyper-convergence offered a sleeker alternative to traditional forms of data-handling, one that has attracted the interest of customers looking to balance cost with effect.

“In some cases, that traditional architecture has grown too unwieldy and too expensive, so they’re looking to hyper-convergence to solve the problem, and in other cases… now that VMware has made its entry there, they’re saying, ‘Hey, if I’m gonna do my due diligence, I need to investigate it,’” he said.

Power to IT

For Yavatkar, the appeal can be found in the ease of management, thanks to the shift toward software-defined handling of large storage infrastructure.

“The biggest advantage of the VSAN approach is integrated into the hypervisor, so you get performance scalability, but more importantly, you get automation of VSAN to management,” he said.

There seemed to be a consensus that the new features to be found in VMware’s innovation make enterprise-class hyper-convergence an accessible reality, though the client-side rate of adoption may pose the largest obstacle to that streamlining.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE