The term “hyperconverged infrastructure,” commonly called HCI, may bring to mind big metal boxes and hardware stacks. But in fact the hardware is the least important ingredient in integrated systems. The software layer — particularly, software-defined storage — is where differentiation occurs.

Gartner Inc. researchers say that HCI is the fastest-growing segment of the integrated systems market. In fact, it has predicted that the HCI market will reach nearly $5 billion and make up 24 percent of integrated systems sales by 2019. Market leaders like Dell EMC and Nutanix Inc. are increasingly calling attention to HCI’s software layer and its place in multi-cloud.

“We live in the age of compressed differentiation,” said Julia Palmer (pictured), director of research at Gartner.

Palmer’s Gartner colleague, analyst Dave Russell, coined the phrase “compressed differentiation” to characterize the state of storage today. Russell believes that obvious differences in storage software are few and far between now; however, the smaller differences are not negligible. “They can be critical for a particular use case,” Palmer added.

Palmer spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during this year’s Nutanix .NEXT US 2017 in Washington, D.C., about the current state of HCI, as well as its viability in the cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Julia Palmer in our Women in Tech feature.

HCI as software

Understanding performance nuances in different SDS types is crucial to choosing among the many HCI products on the market now. “Differentiating on software — this is the name of the game” in HCI, Palmer said.

In her role at Gartner over the past two years, Palmer has had hundreds of conversations with information technology practitioners about hyperconverged infrastructure. As many more vendors have pushed out HCI systems recently, customers find the market has become difficult to navigate. In terms of the hardware basics in the systems, “it’s very similar,” Palmer said. “The only difference in converged infrastructure is how you do storage.”

It is sometimes tricky getting IT professionals to think of HCI as software; there is this metal appliance in front of them, after all. “They look at the commodity hardware, and they still feel uncertain,” Palmer said. They are often accustomed to proprietary hardware with the valuable differentiating features in the box. They must retrain their brains to imagine the software-defined storage layer; though invisible, it is as powerful as the proprietary hardware they are used to — or more so, according to Palmer.

“The value’s in the software,” she said.

Before joining Gartner, Palmer worked in IT departments herself. She managed the web-scale performance engineering team at web hosting company GoDaddy Inc. In these roles, she learned much about the proprietary infrastructure. For one thing, older systems lacked the HCI software layer’s maintenance assist, she stated.

In the event of a proprietary infrastructure outage, Palmer said her IT team would reach out to the vendor for assistance. The vendor would explain that they’d encountered a bug and give them the remedy. Soon they’d be back up and running, but the downtime was not without impact to end users or cost to the business.

“Now a lot of vendors are using predictive analytics, cloud-based analytics to see if there’s anything in your existing environment that’s susceptible,” she said. This software enables HCI providers to proactively contact customers and prevent costly outages, she added.

HCI software layer reaches for cloud

The focus on HCI systems’ software layer is increasing, according to Palmer. Many early adopters chose HCI to save money, and it worked; a 60 percent savings on operating expense was common, she pointed out. This was largely due to the cut in time and work devoted to infrastructure components.

“They stopped managing components. They started managing VMs [virtual machines]. So the next step is stop managing VMs; start managing applications,” she said.

Application-first is what cloud management is all about, Palmer pointed out. While HCI has not yet carved out solid ground in multi-cloud environments, the potential is there, she believes. It all comes down to the software-defined storage layer again.

While some dismiss multi-cloud positioning from HCI companies like Nutanix as cloud washing, Palmer contends they are indeed viable. “If you can have a portable software you can run on any hardware, you obviously can continue and run on any cloud as well,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT US 2017 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Nutanix .NEXT US. Neither Nutanix Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE