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Virtualisation is a cornerstone of today’s enterprise IT architecture, but virtual machines pose a number of performance issues, despite the benefits they bring in cost and efficiency. Storage is a particular weakness in virtualisation. Virtualisation-optimised storage technologies have been slower to develop, despite the rise of high-performance hardware, such as flash. Newer technologies, such as hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) simplify IT deployments and provide an alternative for enterprises running VMs. But, they have downsides too, especially where businesses need to scale up storage capacity. And they demand new skills. So, what are the pros and cons of using SAN, NAS and hyper-converged for virtual machine storage? With so much now running on virtual machines it is increasingly hard to separate the needs of virtualised workloads from the conventional aspects of their deployment. They do, however, require storage for the operating system, applications and their data. In addition, virtual systems to store the ...