For Keith Townsend, it doesn’t matter much if a solution is called HCI or CI. “At the end of the day, the label doesn’t matter. You can call a hotdog a sausage or a sandwich (Just as long as you don’t put ketchup on it).” In general, HCI’s promised simplifiation of IT operations works great for smaller teams, but breaks at scale. This becomes another management stack that adds to, not reduces, complexity. NetApp has an interesting approach by allowing IT to use existing SolidFire management tools on their HCI platform, thereby not introducing yet another management stack.
