‘A Guide to Understanding Common HCI Architectures’
NetApp HCI allows organisations to transform how they consolidate, manage, and run workloads in the hybrid multicloud. Read on to discover how it could add value in your organisation.
If you’re short on time, our guide can teach you:
- Why hyper converged infrastructure is a key enabler of digital transformation
- How to understand the different HCI architectures
- The strengths and weaknesses of different HCI architectures
- How NetApp HCI works
- Which solution you should choose
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A Guide to Understanding Common HCI Architectures
Contents — click to skip ahead to the relevant section
- What is hyper converged infrastructure (HCI)?
- How does NetApp HCI work?
- What is driving HCI?
- NetApp HCI overview
- Why NetApp for HCI?
- NetApp HCI features
- NetApp HCI benefits
- NetApp use cases
- What is hybrid cloud infrastructure?
- Why build a data fabric?
- HCI for mixed enterprise workloads
- HCI for VMware Private Cloud
- HCI data protection with Veeam® software
- HCI in the public sector
- Introducing NetApp HCI in your organisation
What is hyper converged infrastructure (HCI)?
Hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions are built as clusters of commodity servers (x86) that provide an abstracted pool of capacity, memory, and CPU cores that are used as the foundation for server-centric workloads (the hypervisor, VMs, and applications) as well as storage-centric workloads (e.g. data persistence, data access, and data management).
NetApp HCI is an enterprise-scale hybrid cloud infrastructure that exceeds traditional hyper converged offerings through independent scale and guaranteed performance, while enabling cloud data services in an easy to consume on-premises model with self-service opportunities.
NetApp HCI delivers compute, storage and virtualisation resources in building blocks that are easy to consume and manage in a way that is predictable, flexible, and simple.

Hyper converged infrastructure explained
In HCI, both the storage area network and the underlying storage abstractions are implemented virtually in software (at or via the hypervisor).
Because all of the software-defined elements are implemented within the context of the hypervisor, management of all resources can be shared across all instances of a hyper converged infrastructure.
How does NetApp HCI work?
NetApp HCI integrates compute and storage nodes into a solution that is easy to deploy, manage, and scale. NetApp HCI is designed to simplify and automate otherwise mundane tasks with a low-friction, self-service, automated, and consistent consumption experience for multiple tenants running concurrently. This allows engineering teams to stop managing infrastructure and focus on delivering against the organisation’s service objectives and desired outcomes.
