It seems like a lifetime ago – and in IT years, it was – that IT admins were wary of virtualization and skeptical of the benefits that it was promised to bring. Today, virtualization dominates the data center and it looks like everything has changed. But it really hasn’t.

Physically, comparing a data center from 2000 with one from today won’t yield much in the way of differences. There are still servers. There is still a SAN. There are still separate fabrics binding everything together. With the introduction of hyperconverged infrastructure, IT is now at the beginning of a new wave in data center disruption – one that promises even more benefits than those wrought from simple virtualization.