Can HCI be a medicine for any cure?

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is designed to scale infrastructure linearly thus simplifying management aspects by treating the server or the rack as the infrastructure's building block. Simplified management requires fewer IT admin hours thereby reducing operating expenses. This is a very appealing value proposition considering rising labor costs and the shortage of skilled workers. 

HCI delivers excellent results where an application's usage of compute, network, and storage resources scales linearly. In cases when application scalability varies, the HCI may not be effective. For example, the addition of new users increases memory consumption while having no change in CPU or storage usage. Memory, CPU, and storage scalability factor diverge in this scenario. The traditional HCI approach would be to add more hosts which adds unnecessary CPU and storage resources to the data center.

Our research indicates that Converged Infrastructure (CI), may be advantageous in cases when scaling a specific infrastructure's aspect, ie. memory. 

REST APIs, iDRAC, and CloudIQ advancements significantly simplify overall infrastructure management. Ideally, infrastructure management should be a black box, which simply behaves according to the policies defined by the IT admin. 

Note: Cost is provided just for illustrative purposes

Data Center is a complex fabric of interconnected devices, where both HCI and CI have their place. I am optimistic that there will be the development of an architecture that can exhibit advantages of HSI and CI, self-manages, be cost-efficient, safe, and resilient.