Hyperconverged infrastructure storage as software on commodity hardware, not an appliance. Priced like OpenShift itself: by the CPU capacity of your worker nodes, counted the way your subscription counts them.
Hyperconverged storage runs on the same nodes as compute, so there is no separate storage tier to rack or operate. That much is shared by appliance-based HCI and software-defined HCI alike. The difference is the economic model: an appliance ships storage and a licence bundled to the hardware you buy, while simplyblock is software that runs on commodity servers and is priced in line with the platform you already run. This page covers what hyperconverged means in an OpenShift context, how software-defined HCI differs from an appliance model, and how the cost behaves at petabyte scale and across many small clusters.
The Appliance Model
Hyperconvergence solved the separate-storage-tier problem years ago. The unsolved problem is how the software is packaged and priced.
Appliance-style storage stacks its own subscription on top of the platform: capacity tiers, per-volume fees, and a licence that moves independently of your OpenShift budget. At petabyte scale across dense nodes, the licence line item can rival the hardware it runs on.
An appliance bundles storage software with a specific hardware SKU and refresh cycle. Capacity and compute grow on the vendor's terms, on the vendor's hardware, at the vendor's margin, with limited room to fold in servers you already run.
Protection by three-way replication needs three times the raw capacity for the usable capacity you deploy. On NVMe that overhead is expensive, and it is often baked into the appliance sizing before any licence is counted.
How simplyblock Approaches It
What Teams Gain
Fewer drives from erasure coding and a licence that tracks your platform footprint, and does not change with data volume. Model the hardware and compute split for your own capacity in the calculator.
Standard servers, an open software layer, and a licence tied to your platform rather than a hardware SKU. Keep your hardware and your choices.
The same hyperconverged storage runs on a small edge cluster and a large core cluster, so operations and procurement do not fork by site.
Run the numbers
Enter your usable capacity to see the hardware and compute split, with erasure coding at 1.5× raw instead of 3× for replication. No sign-up, and the result is printable.
Hyperconverged means the storage services run on the same nodes as the OpenShift and Kubernetes workloads, rather than on a separate storage tier. simplyblock runs on the compute nodes and presents block volumes over NVMe/TCP, so there is no separate array to rack, license, or operate.
Both put storage and compute on the same nodes. An appliance bundles the storage software with a specific hardware SKU and its own licence tiers. Software-defined HCI runs on commodity servers you choose and is priced in line with your OpenShift or Kubernetes subscription, by worker-node CPU capacity, with no hardware lock-in.
Like the platform itself: by the CPU capacity of your worker nodes, counted the same way as your OpenShift subscription. Control-plane and infrastructure nodes are free, and data volume, features, and replication do not change the price, so storage spend moves in step with the platform budget instead of requiring a separate capacity forecast.
Recovery is automatic. The system isolates the failed drive, rebuilds the affected data against surviving erasure-coded shards using spare capacity, and restores redundancy without a maintenance window. An operator only steps in to physically replace the hardware.
Ask about software-defined HCI versus appliances, platform-aligned versus appliance licensing, erasure coding overhead, or self-healing operations.
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