HCI.
Hyper-convergence is a breakaway term, being coined by Software Defined Storage (SDS) outfits who do not have enough muscle to develop fully-fledged Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) platforms or have simply missed the boat. So they settle for SDS but confuse the market by calling it HC, so they can get on the whole 'hyper' bandwagon.
HCI is the software virtualisation/abstraction of all three main system pillars; compute, network and storage. Unfortunately, up until recently, most HCI vendors (you know who you are), have been only doing compute (hypervisor) and storage (SDS) offerings, while leaving the networking aspect to either a virtual switch (VMware vSwitch or Open vSwitch come to mind) or to good ol' hardware switches. It's only recently that they've started to use Software Defined Networking (SDN), to really push a fully-fledged HCI solution.
What HCI vendors are finding though is that most customers who have invested in VMware or Hyper-V don't really want to move off these platforms, onto a relatively unknown hypervisor (Nutanix offer Acropolis, which is based on Linux KVM), so they also (like 'true' SDS vendors) drop down to the storage layer and flog their wares as merely SDS solutions. This has become so bad, in fact, that Nutanix/Nexenta and others have started to jettison their own hardware and just put their software pack on top of someone else's machines (look at Lenovo).
Of course, the best solution to pursue in all this mess is a private cloud, underpinned by an open source SDS solution, which is not based on any proprietary HC/HCI/SDS platform. Otherwise, you're swapping one set of proprietary products for another.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
