I’ve spoken a bit recently about the world of Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) especially as the technology continues to mature, with both improved hardware stacks and software looking to take advantage of this hardware, it is becoming an ever more compelling prospect.

How do these developments, an HCI version 2.0 if you like, manifest themselves? Recently I saw a good example in a series of blog posts and videos from friend of the show Ruairi McBride, which demonstrated really well both the practical deployment and look and feel of a modern HCI platform.

The videos focussed on NetApp’s new offering and covered the out of the box experience, how to physically cable together your HCI building blocks and how to take your build from delivery to deployment in really easy steps. This demonstration of exactly how you build a HCI platform was interesting, not just on a practical level, but also gave me some thoughts around why and how you may want to use HCI platforms in a business context.

With that in mind, I thought a chat with Ruairi about his experience with this particular HCI platform, how it goes together, how it is practically deployed and how it meets some of the demands of modern business would make an interesting podcast.

So hear it is, Ruairi joins me as we cast our eye over HCI (stole the title from Ruairi’s BLOG post!).

We start by discussing what HCI is and why it’s simplicity of deployment is useful, we also look at the pro’s and cons of the HCI approach. Ruairi shares some thoughts on HCI’s growing popularity and why the world of smartphones may be to blame!

We look at the benefit of a single vendor approach within our infrastructure, but also discuss that although the hardware elements of compute and storage are important, the true value of HCI lies in the software.

We discuss the modern business technology landscape and how a desire for a more “cloud like” experience within our on-premises datacentres has demanded a different approach to how we deploy our technology infrastructure.

We wrap up by looking at why as a business you’d consider HCI, what problems will it solve for you and what are the use cases that are a strong HCI fit and of course, it’s important to remember that HCI isn’t the answer to every question!

To find out more about NetApp HCI visit here.

Ruairi’s initial “Casting Our Eye Over HCI” blog and video series is here.

If you have further questions for Ruairi, you can find him on twitter @mcbride_ruairi.

Until next time.

Thanks for listening.