Hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI — with its commodity hardware packaged with software-defined storage — departs radically from traditional siloed data center architectures. Vendors banging on about how revolutionary and disruptive HCI is may not realize that that is precisely the problem for some holdouts.

“When you introduce HCI to a large enterprise, you’re changing the architecture of the data center [and] also the IT [information technology] operating environment. That’s scary for a lot of people who have spent millions of dollars having a server team, a network team and a storage team,” said Jason Brown (pictured), consultant, product marketing, ScaleIO, at Dell EMC.

Brown spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Lisa Martin (@LisaDaliMartin), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent VMworld conference in Las Vegas. (* Disclosure below.)

One step forward, two steps back

The obstacles to immediate HCI adoption do not mean that large enterprises must remain forever stuck with their data centers of five to ten years ago. There are inroads to HCI and software-defined data centers they can tread at their own careful pace, according to Brown. In order to choose wisely, customers need to understand the differences among these products and how they help or hinder their business objectives. For instance, two such solutions in the Dell technologies portfolio are VMware Inc.’s vSAN and Dell EMC’s ScaleIO — both software-defined storage solutions.

While vSAN is quite popular, its scalability is rather limited compared to that of ScaleIO, Brown explained. ScaleIO allows customers to start small with, say, three or four storage nodes and pay as they scale. It also allows them to preserve their current IT model.

“On the flip side, you can also do a more modern architecture with hyperconverged as well,” Brown said.

ScaleIO is suited to service providers ready to go all in with hyperconverged out-of-the-gate. “But enterprises usually start more traditional and then move to hyperconverged. And Scale IO provides that pathway to get there,” Brown concluded.

Watch the complete video theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017  (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Dell EMC have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE