When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn Although converged and hyper-converged infrastructure are similar in many senses, hyper-converged infrastructure takes the same design philosophy a few steps further, increasing the consolidation of IT resources for easier comprehensive management.
Basic converged infrastructure emerged as a way to more easily handle individual components of hardware setups, for the cloud and other platforms. The range of hardware pieces controlled in converged infrastructure generally consists of servers, networking equipment and storage devices. Experts have described converged infrastructure as a number of components networked together with a management layer on top.
By contrast, hyper-converged infrastructure adds to the consolidation of design, while adding other extras such as compression, data backup and data de-duplication resources, along with things like WAN optimization and resources for creating snapshots. One way to describe hyper-converged infrastructure is that vendors "put everything in a box" so that everything is integrated and easy to control on a cloud platform. Both converged infrastructure and hyper-converged infrastructure are related to the move to put business systems into the cloud, where comprehensive management systems and techniques are needed to maintain service efficiency.
