If the hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, was a TV show, it would be airing at 8 p.m. on a Saturday night in all of the big markets, the prime viewing hour. The technology that consolidates compute, storage and networking into one system has gone mainstream in the enterprise as executives for Dell EMC have witnessed a transformation over the past two years.

“HCI is prime time; it’s here,” said Colin Gallagher (pictured), senior director of VxRail product marketing at Dell EMC. “Last year it was, ‘Tell me how I use HCI,’ and this year it’s, ‘Tell me where I can’t use HCI.’”

Gallagher paid a visit to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts Peter Burris (@plburris) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante) during VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the evolution of HCI, ways to eliminate potential network bottlenecks and recent hybrid cloud announcements. (* Disclosure below.)

Dell EMC’s hyperconverged systems are provided through the VxRail and VxRack software-defined data center, or SDDC, product lines. There is also a larger portfolio that encompasses offerings such as vSAN Ready Nodes for customers who want to build their own HCI systems.

Risk of networking bottlenecks

As HCI becomes more widely adopted, there is risk that bottlenecks will occur. In the evolution of enterprise computing, there was initially a focus on designing for the CPU and then storage to eliminate bottlenecks there. With everything connected through the network in the hyperconverged world, there’s a chance that could become the new choke point.

“The network may be the upcoming bottleneck right now,” said Gallagher, who pointed out that HCI depends heavily on a proper balance between storage and compute. “As hyperconverged is going more mainstream, more normal, it’s pushing those subtle boundaries there,” he added.

To manage that balance and avoid such a bottleneck, Dell EMC is working with customers on design considerations to flex out to the cloud for more storage or compute capability when necessary.

Dell EMC recently announced its Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud turnkey platforms. “Our number one customer for someone who buys into EHC is they’ve tried to build cloud on their own and failed,” Gallagher explained. “EHC is much more for traditional workloads, for customers looking to get into hybrid cloud.”

NHC is for cloud-native workloads and provides a simple way to run in the Pivotal Cloud Foundry. “If you’re deploying workloads that will run in Pivotal and you want to run that in-house and then migrate it later to a cloud, that’s what NHC is for,” Gallagher concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and 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