---
# source: src/content/services/en/storage.md
# route:  /en/services/storage/
title: Storage
group: infrastructure
order: 9
tags: [storage, data-management]
vendors: [hpe]
summary: Block, hyperconverged or scale-out, depending on what runs on it. The choice is settled by recovery time, not by capacity.
photoNeed: "Storage hardware being handled: a disk shelf open, or a drive being seated, hands visible"
stub: false
draft: false
---

## Three shapes, three use cases

**Block storage** for virtual infrastructure, attached over Fibre Channel SAN or iSCSI.
Continuous availability here comes from synchronous replication with automatic failover.

**HCI or dHCI** delivers storage, compute and networking from the same box. The main
advantage is integrated management, and the price is that compute and capacity grow
together.

**Scale-out on software-defined storage** for file services over CIFS and NFS, or for
object storage. Data can sit across several sites, which is how very high availability
figures are reached.

## What actually decides it

Rarely capacity. Usually the question of how quickly something has to be back when it is
gone, and how many sites are involved in making that true. Both belong at the start rather
than in the tender.

All-flash with NVMe is the answer to latency, not to availability. Those two get confused
regularly.