HCI – Hyper-Converged Infrastructure – A software combination for clustered servers including an operating system, generally a hypervisor, plus etworking and storage. The block-access storage is based on a server’s direct-attached drives and aggregated across servers in an HCI cluster to form a virtual SAN, vSAN in trademarked VMware parlance. Example HCI suppliers are Nutanix, Scale Computing and VMware.HCI came about as an easy-to-buy and smaller scale alterantive to Conveged Infrastructure (CI) which involved rack-level combinations of a SAN storage array, servers, operating system and network switches. The clear example here is the EMC-Cisco Vblock.
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