What are the main differences between hyper-converged and converged infrastructures?
The main difference is that hyper-converged infrastructures are defined by software and completely transparent. In this type of infrastructure, components cannot be separated in the same way as in the converged ones, but they are more flexible and customizable.
The flexibility of hyper-converged infrastructures makes them more scalable and cost-effective, because you can add, for example, more storage blocks as needed. In the converged ones, this option isn't possible, since it is necessary to add whole packages, what makes them more expensive.
The initial costs of both technologies may seem high, but in the long term they are cheaper, because you only have to update them once.
Storage is another of the differences, since in the case of the convergent, it is directly connected to the physical server.
Hyper-converged infrastructures feature a storage controller that runs on all nodes of a cluster to improve the scalability and resilience. The storage logic controller is a piece of software that is attached to each virtual machine at hypervisor level, and software-defined storage leads all local storage through the cluster and configures it as a single storage pool. This allows to keep data that require fast response time locally and those used less frequently are stored on servers with more space.