HPE Discover 2019 was taking place in Las Vegas this week, and they made a lot of announcements, but I want to talk about their announcement of an additional hyperconverged product in their lineup, the Nimble dHCI.

HPE already has two hyperconverged options in their portfolio. HPE bought HCI provider Simplicity back in January of 2017, and they also work with and sell Nutanix on their hardware.

In March of 2017 they announced their acquisition of Nimble which is a modern storage platform and not a hyperconverged solution. At Discover this week, they announced Nimble dHCI, which, adds in some Proliant servers and a switch. This is what they are branding dHCI.

Just what we need, more acronyms.

The “D” in dHCI stand for disaggregated. Now, disaggregated is a term I frequently use. Disaggregation is really the process of taking something and separating it into its component parts.

For example, one could deconstruct a platform, extracting the software components from the hardware to make it more portable and open. This is an important idea in networking. Rather than have a monolithic hardware appliance, networking software is removed from the hardware, made to operate in an open standards way so that the choice of hardware vendor is up to you. They take this a step further by separating out the networking protocols as independent functions so that you don’t need to run, monitor and support capabilities that you don’t use.

In this case, we are talking about convergence. Which is sort of the opposite of disaggregation. with converged, you put everything together to simplify. One throat to choke so to speak. 

Back in the old days (a few years ago) we had converged systems, VBlock, FlexPod, FlashStack. This was a set of hardware and software components that were designed to interoperate well, to take the complexity out of building a system, sometimes at the expense of flexibility. HCI took this a step further putting it all together on a consolidated platform.

So, what do you get when you take a Hyper Converged System and disaggregate it? Well, that would be a converged system, wouldn’t it? Or, you could just call it a single vendor solution like we did 5 years ago.

This is not to disparage the product, solutions like this can be very effective and reduce the complexities within your environment, but to me, this is a product that is not so much engineered as created by marketing.

EMC is really good at this, they have a great marketing team. However, I feel that when there is a lot of hype around the latest new acronym, it is a good idea to take a step back and think about what the problem is your are trying to solve.

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