SMB3

Not everything needs to be hyper-converged.

There’s a strong narrative in the infrastructure world that three-tier architecture—separate compute, network, and storage tiers—is outdated. That hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is the only path forward. That separating your storage from your compute is a legacy pattern.

That narrative is incomplete.

Three-tier architecture remains the right answer for many workloads and many organizations. If you have an existing SAN investment, if your workloads require deterministic storage performance, if you need storage-level replication for disaster recovery, or if your team has deep storage operations expertise—three-tier isn’t just viable, it’s often superior.