Software-defined Data Centers vs. Hyperconverged Infrastructure

The evolution of digital business have changed the overall perspective of how we see and interact with technology and services and carved new approaches of developing data centers and converged infrastructures. In the long run, Software-defined Data Centers (SDDCs) emerged that helped to effectively develop and operate large pool of infrastructure elements such as networking, storage, security, etc., which is abstracted from hardware and implemented through software.

Hyper-converged systems and software-defined storage offer similar storage management features, but the technologies are designed very differently.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Hyperconvergence is an integration of compute and virtualization resources in a single server system. As efficient as it could be, the goal is to minimize the complexities and simplify management approach.
Hyperconvered infrastructure are designed to be hardware-centric and focused more on developing on top of converged data centers by including more additional elements such as WAN optimization, inline deduplication and inline compression.
The systems manages the overall infrastructure through a single system and standard tool set that further encourages infrastructure growth through an easy point-and-click actions and check boxes. This means that each can function individually despite on being the same physical infrastructure. Besides, the system is often deployed in remote location and are expected as a best path to the cloud. In addition, isolating physical hardware from data center operations can enable workloads and applications to work more closely than in traditional infrastructures. Moreover, a storage controller is no longer essential as any new storage added will be a part of the cluster and configured as part of a single storage system.