Hyperconverged Infrastructure as the linchpin of hybrid cloud? Sounds far-fetched to some, but Julia Palmer (pictured), director of research at Gartner Inc., says there’s often more to HCI appliances than meets the eye.

“I don’t think it’s there today, but I think it has great potential,” Palmer told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Nutanix .NEXT event in Washington, D.C. (* Disclosure below.)

The softer side of HCI

In her two years at Gartner, Palmer has had hundreds of conversations with converged and hyperconverged appliance end-users. The bare-bones simplicity of the latest HCI products tends to raise questions of the too-good-to-be-true variety. “They look at the commodity hardware, and they still feel uncertain,” Palmer said.

“We live in the age of compressed differentiation,” she said, borrowing the phrase from her Gartner colleague, analyst Dave Russell. The gist of Russell’s theory is that obvious differences in storage hardware and software have flattened out; however, smaller differences exist that can critically impact performance.

Storage warrants such scrutiny, particularly when packaged in HCI, Palmer stated. “It’s the same flavors of hypervisor; it’s the same commodity hardware. So what do we have different? The ways you do data services, the ways you position your storage, deliver the storage services,” Palmer stated.

HCI customers should opt for software-defined storage, she said. Here is where value can be gauged in terms of abstracting and distributing data at scale and reducing time-consuming manual work. This software layer is also where HCI’s versatility for on-prem and cloud environments becomes feasible, she added.

“If you have portable software you can run on any hardware, you obviously can continue and run on any cloud as well,” Palmer 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